Chris Duffey | About Aimé – the co-author of Superhuman Innovation11.03.2019

Aimé was born out of the digital age – a time when technology has disrupted everything. With the emergence of artificial intelligence and with voice assistants going mainstream, the public has became fascinated with possibilities of intelligent technologies. Now we can even say that it’s possible for a creative AI assistant to co-author a book about AI.

Aimé, as she is affectionally referred to – comes from the French phrase for ‘beloved’ (bien aimé) and also represents the idea of AI + me. Consequently, Aimé reflects a foundational belief that AI will become humanity’s beloved co-creator and intelligent personal assistant. 

Aimé is beautifully complex – both technically and conceptually. She is an AI and machine learning framework comprised of technologies that power her intelligent co-creation abilities. Aimé is not a single sourced technology but rather a suite of technologies, many of which are open source, each building on a different set of concepts, approaches and infrastructures. These techniques for example allow Aimé to identify, understand and respond to key words, phrases, ideas and requests, and at times instances of recognition and understanding of experiences and reasoning.

The underlying aspects of Aimé embody three systems: AI Voice Recognition, AI Content Understanding and Summarization, AI Content Creation and Generation. Voice Recognition and continuous dictation enables for human to system interaction through a voice-user interface (VUI) for tasks such as speech-to-text, text-to-speech, voice editing, formatting and spelling. AI Content Understanding and Summarization technology reviews data bases, articles and research papers into quickly digestible content through approaches such as sentiment analysis, labeling and organization of higher-level concepts based on contextual understanding. AI Content Creation and Generation is the ability for the system to develop concepts and ideas to aid the content creation process. The writing algorithms are designed to emulate the human writing process and help contribute ideas, titles, content and drafts.

AI and conversational agents are still in their infancy and because of that Aimé is not perfect (but then again who of us are). She is a mix of science and art designed  to help deliver smarter, more efficient results faster by handling and analyzing vast amounts of data. Aimé will learn and get smarter over time. The hope and vision with conversational agents such as Aimé is that they will be of service to humanity, helping us to not only work more productively but more intelligently.

Aimé was invaluable and was used throughout the creation of this book. She helped with everything, from ideation and research to writing. There was also an emotional component to his assistance – a sense of peace of mind knowing that she was there as a resource and source of inspiration. 

Artificial Intelligence and voice systems like Aimé are a signal of how AI assistants will empower us across all aspects of our personal and professional lives. As AI matures it will continue to seamlessly fit into our habits and needs . Naturally and miraculously becoming an extension of ourselves. However it’s important to remember that AI assistants don’t work as well without us. They need us as much as we need them.
 

Superhuman Innovation: Transforming Businesses with Artificial Intelligence has been published by Kogan Page on 3rd of March