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Beyond Google Search of Personal Data – Proactive, AI Digital Assistant 

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As per previous Post, Google Searches Your Personal Data (Calendar, Gmail, Photos), and Produces Consolidated Results, why can’t the Google Assistant take advantage of the same data sources?

Google may attempt to leapfrog their Digital Assistant competition by taking advantage of their ability to search against all Google products.  The more personal data a Digital Assistant may access, the greater the potential for increased value per conversation.

As a first step,  Google’s “Personal”  Search tab in their Search UI has access to Google Calendar, Photos, and your Gmail data.  No doubt other Google products are coming soon.

Big benefits are not just for the consumer to  search through their Personal Goggle data, but provide that consolidated view to the AI Assistant.  Does the Google [Digital] Assistant already have access to Google Keep data, for example.  Is providing Google’s “Personal” search results a dependency to broadening the Digital Assistant’s access and usage?  If so, these…

interactions are most likely based on a reactive model, rather than proactive dialogs, i.e. the Assistant initiating the conversation with the human.

Note: The “Google App” for mobile platforms does:

“What you need, before you ask. Stay a step ahead with Now cards about traffic for your commute, news, birthdays, scores and more.”

I’m not sure how proactive the Google AI is built to provide, but most likely, it’s barely scratching the service of what’s possible.

Modeling Personal, AI + Human Interactions

Starting from N number of accessible data sources, searching for actionable data points, correlating these data points to others, and then escalating to the human as a dynamic or predefined Assistant Consumer Workflow (ACW).  Proactive, AI Digital Assistant initiates human contact to engage in commerce without otherwise being triggered by the consumer.

Actionable data point correlations can trigger multiple goals in parallel.  However, the execution of goal based rules would need to be managed.  The consumer doesn’t want to be bombarded with AI Assistant suggestions, but at the same time, “choice” opportunities may be appropriate, as the Google [mobile] App has implemented ‘Cards’ of bite size data, consumable from the UI, at the user’s discretion.

As an ongoing ‘background’ AI / ML process, Digital Assistant ‘server side’ agent may derive correlations between one or more data source records to get a deeper perspective of the person’s life, and potentially be proactive about providing input to the consumer decision making process.

Bass Fishing Trip
Bass Fishing Trip

For example,

  • The proactive Google Assistant may suggest to book your annual fishing trip soon.  Elevated Interaction to Consumer / User.
  • The Assistant may search Gmail records referring to an annual fishing trip ‘last year’ in August. AI background server side parameter / profile search.   Predefined Assistant Consumer Workflow (ACW) – “Annual Events” Category.  Building workflows that are ‘predefined’ for a core set of goals/rules.
  • AI Assistant may search user’s photo archive on the server side.   Any photo metadata could be garnished from search, including date time stamps, abstracted to include ‘Season’ of Year, and other synonym tags.
  • Photos from around ‘August’ may be earmarked for Assistant use
  • Photos may be geo tagged,  e.g. Lake Champlain, which is known for its fishing.
  •  All objects in the image may be stored as image metadata. Using image object recognition against all photos in the consumer’s repository,  goal / rule execution may occur against pictures from last August, the Assistant may identify the “fishing buddies” posing with a huge “Bass fish”.
  • In addition to the Assistant making the suggestion re: booking the trip, Google’s Assistant may bring up ‘highlighted’ photos from last fishing trip to ‘encourage’ the person to take the trip.

This type of interaction, the Assistant has the ability to proactively ‘coerce’ and influence the human decision making process.  Building these interactive models of communication, and the ‘management’ process to govern the AI Assistant is within reach.

Predefined Assistant Consumer / User Workflows (ACW) may be created by third parties, such as Travel Agencies, or by industry groups, such as foods, “low hanging fruit” easy to implement the “time to get more milk” .  Or, food may not be the best place to start, i.e. Amazon Dash

 

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AI Email Workflows Eliminate Need for Manual Email Responses

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When i read the article “How to use Gmail templates to answer emails faster.”  I thought wow, what an 1990s throwback!

Microsoft Outlook has had an AI Email Rules Engine for years and years. From using a simple Wizard to an advanced construction rules user interface. Oh the things you can do. Based on a wide away of ‘out of the box’ identifiers to highly customizable conditions, MS Outlook may take action on the client side of the email transaction or on the server side. What types of actions? All kinds of transactions ranging from ‘out of the box’ to a high degree of customization. And yes, Outlook (in conjunction with MS Exchange) may be identified as a digital asset management (DAM) tool.

Email comes into an inbox, based on “from”, “subject”, contents of email, and a long list of attributes, MS Outlook [optionally with MS Exchange], for example, may push the Email and any attached content, to a server folder, perhaps to Amazon AWS S3, or as simple as an MS Exchange folder.

Then, optionally a ‘backend’ workflow may be triggered, for example, with the use of Microsoft Flow. Where you go from there has almost infinite potential.

Analogously, Google Gmail’s new Inbox UI uses categorization based on ‘some set’ of rules is not something new to the industry, but now Google has the ability. For example, “Group By” through Google’s new Inbox, could be a huge timesaver. Enabling the user to perform actions across predefined email categories, such as delete all “promotional” emails, could be extremely successful. However, I’ve not yet seen the AI rules that identify particular emails as “promotional” verses “financial”. Google is implying these ‘out of the box’ email categories, and the way users interact, take action, are extremely similar per category.

Google may continue to follow in the footsteps of Microsoft, possibly adding the initiation of workflows based on predetermined criteria. Maybe Google will expose its AI (Email) Rules Engine for users to customize their workflows, just as Microsoft did so many years ago.

Although Microsoft’s Outlook (and Exchange) may have been seen as a Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool in the past, the user’s email Inbox folder size could have been identified as one of the few sole inhibitors.  Workaround, of course, using service accounts with vastly higher folder quota / size.

My opinions do not reflect that of my employer.