Do Androids Dream of Chocolate Cake? Click

Now on BBC News, it's time for Click.

This week, destressing with a future ball, knocking up Google, and

shouting at Amazon. Tell me, who is the murderer! THEME SONG.

Welcome home. How was your day? Awful. That is a shame. I will run

you a bath and play relaxing music. MUSIC PLAYS. Rory, do I have any

messages. 17,000 Tweets, and fake news updates. Anything urgent? Your

boss wants dinner tonight. Is there anything to eat? A scallop which

feeds four. The oven will come on now and his favourite wine will come

at seven. And get some chocolate double fudge cake. I have ordered

it. Shall I apply for a gym membership for you? Mute. One day we

really will have artificial intelligence in our personal

assistance which we can talk to and who know us better than ourselves.

Thank you, Rory. You are welcome. We are not there yet, but we are well

on the way. What started in our phones with names like Siri,

Cortana, and, uh, OK, Google, can now control cars and homes too. Echo

led the way. And Google is coming out in the UK. It is good to have

personal assistants, but the more we use them, the more trust we have to

placed in them. OK, Google, is Obama planning a coup? According to

secret. In his day job, Rory recently discovered that you cannot

always believe what they say. Obama is going to have a communist who at

the end of his term in 2018. That fake news story was the top search

result for that question. Dan Simmons has been looking at some of

the other unintended consequences of living with these devices.

As we transition from controlling things from screens to using our

voice, those providing services could start getting tricky. I am in

the BBC's Blue Room, a space where the broadcaster posts out new

technology. And with the voice assistance, it is not all going

smoothly. Alexa, when is the next train to Manchester? Sorry, I did

not understand the question I heard. If you have to find out when the

next train to Manchester is, right now you have to say, open the

National Rail App and go through other steps. That is not natural.

You have to go through many steps to find out content from somebody else

to be the default service provider is very simple. Blame a song from a

certain provider, tell me the news from a certain provider. -- play me

a. That is a great thing for that, but everything else is critical. A

lot of work needs to be done to level the playing field. And that

disadvantage applies to search results as well. Up until now,

website and to be on the first page of results. With voice assistance,

just one answer comes back. OK, Google, how far is the moon? That is

fine if it is a right or wrong definitive answer. That is what

companies do most. It is this far from Earth. More controversial if

you are looking for a product or service. For anyone else, how did

you get to that position? Only one person can have the first spot.

Everyone else will have to figure out what did they do, how do they

work with Amazons and Googles to figure out how to get their results

first. This is not the end of the world, it is just the end of

competition as we know it. Oxford University is home to one of the

world's most influential thinkers when it comes to competition to be

if we use our assistants to buy stuff, this man believes there will

be consequences, and they will not be unintended ones. That shift from

that environment to the digital helper, what is it that you have?

You have a helper that is voice-activated, you are one step

further from the ability to look for outside options. Your ability to

check whether the price you received is truly the best price. You tell

your helper, order me one, two, three, and you just assumed that the

helper will serve your needs. The likelihood is that in a two side

market, the helper is actually serving the platform. Today, your

assumption, our default assumption, is the price you receive is the

competitive rice. -- price. And you are suggesting that it will not be?

I am telling you that it is not. A walk down Oxford's Cornmarket street

reveal something the professor believes will not be around much

longer on line. How much is this, for example? How much is this today?

?5. This gentle man over here, hello, how much would you sell this

to him, and how much to me? You just met us in the street. The same price

for everyone. Of course. Absolutely. Do you think I would pay more? No.

To be honest, lately, tourists by more. Really? You think you made for

-- may pay more than me? It is one price for everyone, but digital

assistants will get to know us so well, prices will be tailored to us

as well, effectively becoming a gatekeeper to the best deals. I went

to see one of those gatekeepers, Google, and asked them if sellers

goodbye their way to the top result and get recommended by their digital

assistant. -- could purchase. The consumer is the main focus for us.

Doing something like that will not help them find what they want. We

want to make sure we are focused on what they want. Amazon told us there

is lots of potential and room for many participants to be our job is

to innovate on behalf of the customer and then let customers

decide. By perhaps what these home assistants are most useful for is

what they are becoming most known for, and that is controlling other

things around the house. Alexa, turn on the bar lights. OK. Alexa, bar

lights off. OK. PHONE RINGS. Hi. Dan, are you there? Look, I know we

have not seen each other, and you think I am crazy, but I was just

passing by, and... Oh, wait, have you still got that stupid voice

control thing, what was it, Alexa? Turn on the bar lights. OK. Alexa,

turn on the microwave. Have I got your attention now? Alexa, unlock

the front door. OK. It is only me. We set that up. But the lights were

real, even though the other and in the front door was faked a little

bit by us to just show you what the potential is of this technology if

it cannot recognise your voice. In actual fact, Amazon tell us the

unlock feature for doors is not available on the Echo, and that may

be the biggest admission there is that there is a lot to be done with

security on these devices. Welcome to the Week in Tech. . The week that

Apple said its latest apps laptop was a bad design. And Blizzard, the

maker of Overwatch, successfully sued a cheater for copyright

infringement. But Graphine stole the show. They have created a means of

removing salt from sea water, eventually bringing potential to

provide cheap water. Amazon has been selling a billion dollars' worth of

shares a year for a space project. They had to send travellers into

space in the next two years. In Massachusetts, a robotic arm picks

up random objects and puts them on a conveyor belt all day and shares its

information with other robots so they can do it too. It could be a

warehouse of the future. And a man flew with a robot arm developed in

his garage. It has six jet engines. It can fly hundreds of miles per

hour. Although Richard is exercising restraint, he said, for now. Amazon

Echo, Google Home, maybe one day even Rory. It looks like the rise of

the digital assistant is upon us. All of these are trying to be wide

ranging all-purpose artificial intelligence systems. That is the

technical term, Horizontal AI. That is hard. To cover a lot of subjects

and too many tasks, these things have to understand a lot of things.

Rory, tell Stephen I will call him in the office after my train

journeys. First it works out what I said. Then it pulls out the

important words. Then comes the reasoning and context it needs, and

it does so by scanning my calendar and my train timetable and guess is

that he is the Stephen in the office, not the friend, and then the

right action needs to be performed, schedule the call and let him know.

But ROVs best placed to do that? -- are these. Or should we speak to

other specialist Vertical AIs that it do one job really, really well. X

dot AI is a company that thinks that. We scheduled a call for his

secretary, Andrew. It was only after five messages we realised that

Andrew is actually artificial intelligence, a specialist AI that

only scheduled meeting. I have to say it interpreted Aaron messages

and request pretty well. Shore enough, on line is the man who

invented it, Dennis. Congratulations, you fooled us with

Andrew. Will we have any general assistants in the future or many

vertical ones? We imagine this will play at in the short-term future.

Think Siri, Alexa, so on, they will answer simple questions, but will

also enable us to talk to vertical AIs which are specialised in doing

one job really well. I think what will happen is you will have a whole

plethora of Vertical AIs on your payroll, like Siri and Cortana, with

13 agents on payrolls to do jobs you don't want to do. There is a whole

application store for this with different jobs in different needs.

It will be the same with intelligent agents. You will have different

needs. Take you for your time. Sender Aaron love to Andrew. -- Send

our love. In San Francisco, we have been living a very smart life.

Set the temperature to 72 degrees. Setting to Brita to 72 degrees... To

be gay I is a faithful servant arranger Rome. Its control comes

from and read out, and the Nicolet proud of the way it understands when

you are saying. Turn the lights on in the living room. Turning light on

in the living room. Make it read. Setting colour to read in the living

room. Typically, when you have different devices from different

brands and manufacturers that have a bunch of apps for every device, and

it is really inconvenient to jump around and switch from one up to

another. The app integrates with other popular home devices. But like

most smart home assistance, the commands are pretty basic. In the

future, we will add scenes. When you wake up in the morning, you can say

good morning, and then Peter Richel will be comfortable view and the

lights will be on in certain areas. These home assistance are still a

little buggy and frustrating at times. But they are getting there.

And study to feel quite useful. The next challenge is to take those

assistance outside of the home. Ford recently opened this research centre

in the silicon valley. One of its main project is to integrate smart

assistance into its cars. They have been working with others on to work

in the Alexa assistant. You can find out important information about your

car. Moto3, asked me ford mobile for my tyre pressure. Your vehicle's

tyre pressure is not currently showing any warnings. -- Alexa, show

me my Ford. If you had to wait in a freezing vehicle as it warms up, you

might appreciate this. Ask me Ford to warm up my car. OK, so your pin.

Five, six, seven, eight. Sending start command to the car. I mean, it

is not quite the roar of the engine, but it is surely be causing you can

do with this technology right now. Out on the road, the assistant steps

in to make typical in car function of little more hands-free. --

functions. Alexa, continue reading my audio book. OK, so I can pick up

where I left off. The three, find the nearest coffee shop. Here are a

few nearby options... The integration is fun, but far from

perfect. Alexa still suffers from the same problem that many

assistants have, rather than talking naturally to it, you find yourself

having to think about what phrase will unlock the information you

need. When you're trying to drive, that silicon could quite

distracting. It has a leg which detection system, so does understand

what you say, independent of how you say it. I wonder if people will be

thinking more about Alexa is thinking, rather than what is ahead

of them on the road. As a driver, we want to make driving safer, so you

should always keep your hands on the steering wheel and focus on the

road. And then to your entertainment and entertainment on the road, you

could use your voice, which is really the safest way to interact

with the car, in general. James looked at it different in the early

80s. To get Dolby 5.1 audio. To get realistic lighting effects. Forget

about 3-D graphics in most cases. Attitudes to games won't exactly

enthusiastic, either. Sports games. Well, these are perhaps the most

appalling list of computers to me. This is to cap on. Doing a decathlon

on a Commodore, white wagging a joystick, is not a substitute for

fresh air. Ouch. There was one genre of games, though, where the graphics

and audio did not matter. Where did not matter that you would often be

presented with a still, 8-bit image, or sometimes just a black screen

with a flashing white coaster. That screen itself was the window into

worlds of limitless imagination. Welcome to the experience of the

text adventure. When competing power is limited, the text adventure that

players head scratching puzzles and mysteries, all brought to life by

typing instructions into the game. But the reason that I have taken us

on this journey down 32 kilobits memory lane is because of the games

that have been playing on this, the Amazon Echo. It is titled I see

those old text adventures quite a bit. Leading you through the Abbey,

the bass approach is one of the sisters. -- abbess. You might think

playing a game in one of these is like trying to play a game on a

microwave. Because it lacks a screen or any other way of interacting with

it other than barking commands at it, but that is exactly how the game

I am about to play works. Play risque. -- Runescape. This story is

about an assassin Demon... The player must solve a murder in a

fantasy realm. The gameplay is like an interaction to make interactive

version of an audio book. You get on dialogue, then it went for a

response. Surprisingly, it commands quite a

bit of your attention, and it is quite a relaxing way to play a game,

although that relaxing mood is shattered when you hear this. Sorry,

that is not a valid command. Which you hear quite a lot. Would you like

to talk to the abbess are now? Talk to the abbess. Sorry... Talk to the

grocery... Sorry, that is not a valid command. -- talk to the

abbess. It can shatter the elution and become increasingly frustration

when it does not understand what you are saying. Which is busily bit of a

problem for again you play by talking to it. Sorry, that is not a

valid command. When it does work, though, Runescape

on the Amazon Echo is fun and immersive. It highlights the

potential these devices have beyond reading at the weather to you or

reciting rubbish jokes. Runescape is available by the skill section of

the Alexa up. -- app. Have a sick bay filled with headaches... When

Star Trek introduced a device to scan a passionate and, with a

diagnosis, it was in the realm of science fiction. But 50 years on,

this dream is becoming a reality. It, we will discover the winner of

$18 million prize playing a march to such a's medical device. The

challenge? To design and build a device that will register 13

conditions. It could and visits to the doctor. We figured out what the

diagnostic process is, at least the way I am doing it, and build a

system with that in mind. So it is not like a single device like the

Star Trek series. It lets us you interact with it on a tablet in our

prototype, and then plugged in components. So we have a little

device like this. User will be guided, they are guided to listen to

sounds. Des Connor device in your home is really a medical centre

right in your house. -- this kind of device. If your child is ill, if you

are not feeling well, it is your first stop. There is a revolution

coming in healthcare. This is the type of device that is going to help

give people the power to take care of themselves. And as soon as we

know who has one, we will let you know on Twitter. Think you for all

your interactions on Twitter, too, which this week included choosing

the name of our artificial intelligent to intelligence. So good

night, Rory. See you soon.