At the Marketing AI Institute, we read dozens of articles on artificial intelligence every week to uncover the most valuable ones for our subscribers (become a subscriber today), and we curate them for you here. We call it 3 Links in 3 Minutes. Enjoy!
Geek of the Week
GeekWire’s Geek of the Week profiles the characters of Pacific Northwest tech, science, games, and innovation. One of this month’s features is 17-year-old Zoe Sheill from Mercer Island, Washington.
Sheill is a very busy student. Alongside attending class at Mercer Island High School, Sheill is also taking online courses in artificial intelligence and machine learning on Coursera and Udemy, and coding as an AI/engineering intern at Pioneer Square Labs in Seattle after school.
“I’ve taken classes on machine learning, deep learning, web and mobile development, economics, and psychology, which has inspired me to create apps of my own and work on some cool projects,” Sheill said.
When she’s not busy learning, you can find Sheill serving her community (she’s the president of the Homeless Education & Living Project) and winning awards (she placed in the top two teams in the U.S. and top 12 worldwide in the WeTutor Technovation Challenge).
Sheill has been accepted to MIT, Princeton, Yale, University of Washington CSE, Columbia, and Duke, among others, and has yet to decide where she will be attending in the fall of 2018.
Her full interview can be found here.
New AI Features for Gmail
Google’s Gmail received eight new features last month, a few of which are powered heavily by artificial intelligence, and Inc. has the breakdown.
First of the AI-infused features is nudging. Gmail will send a reminder for emails that are a few days old that you may want to respond to. A notification will appear asking if you’d like to reply.
Another new feature is high-priority notifications. When turned on, Gmail will only send push notifications for new emails that it recognizes as a priority for you. This preferencing is based on contact affinity or the likelihood that you need to read and/or respond to a message in the near term.
Lastly, a feature that has been available on mobile for the last year is coming to the Gmail web app—smart replies. At the bottom of a message, Gmail will suggest three likely responses based on the message in the email. Over time, it adapts the language to your style, for example using exclamation points for “Thanks!” instead of a plain “Thanks.”
Some of these features are available now and the rest will go live over the next few weeks. To use, simply opt-in through Gmail settings, or for G-Suite users, ask your domain administrator to enable the features.
The Future of Emotional AI
According to CNBC, China’s largest smartphone producer, Huawei, wants to make conversations between user and voice assistants more emotionally interactive.
HiAssistant, Huawei’s voice assistant, is used by 110 million users on a daily basis in China. Using this software, the tech giant plans to release a more emotion-based AI assistant in the near future that will attempt to hold a conversation as long as possible so the end-user does not feel alone. To do this, the assistant has to have not only a high IQ but also a high EQ, emotional quotient.
Currently, emotion AIs are not very widespread, but Gartner research company believes they will spread naturally as voice assistants continue to grow in popularity. Virtual assistants on the market today process commands and questions but lack the contextual information needed to understand and respond to a user’s emotional state.
Ashley Sams
Ashley Sams is director of marketing at Ready North. She joined the agency in 2017 with a background in marketing, specifically for higher education and social media. Ashley is a 2015 graduate of The University of Mount Union where she earned a degree in marketing.