Joseph Weizenbaum, a big name in the field of Artificial Intelligence earlier in those days and now as well. A day in his life in 1966 lets us know that he was relaxing in his lab in the well-known MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology almost every computer student wants to get in there in their lives and just in front of him was an electric typewriter and teleprinter and Joseph could be easily seen typing “I am very unhappy these days” and a response was awaited.
Few moments passed and then to the surprise of the visitor an IBM 7094 system came to life from dead after sounds of clicks and whirring a response got printed on the teleprinter saying “How long have you been very happy these days?”
And guess what the response was not from any human but was from the machine itself and its worth mentioning that the early Internet ARPANET was still 3 years away. The words were from ELIZA a program in which Joseph spent 2 years at MIT to make functional.
This was worth mentioning that JOSEPH developed a Chatbot at that time when the personal computer was 10 years away and the microprocessor was 3 years away.
Joseph left us in 2008 and after 2 years in 2010 since the world ELIZA the E-Commerce giant began working on it with full force in their Lab126 Offices in Sunnyvale, California. After four long years, a descendant of ELIZA was born namely ECHO (Amazon Echo), which was a cylindrical device with a speaker attached within and a blend of Artificial Intelligence.
It would answer simple questions and be revolutionary at that time. The users interacted with it by using a wake word and the cylinder would respond to it.
And eventually, a powerful digital assistant powered the “smart speaker” tech Amazon’s next product ALEXA came into existence. Alexa was not living in the ECHO’s hardware but was living on Amazon’s servers.
Alexa overall is way smarter than any of the Chatbots made previously and is built to become smarter day by day as it learns from how the user interacts and responds and learns new word according to the ongoing conversation and the information is stored on the cloud-based Microsoft servers. Which made it superior and people began to find it as a counselor.
The digital assistant is connected by wifi to a router depending upon the user and works seamlessly on devices with good Internet speeds. Alexa was welcomed by the users all over the world and people often shared personal emotions with the device.
According to the recent study, Alexa has led to various sorts of positive results in the lives of lonely people who had no friends or fewer friends.
It is awesome to get a response from a machine that is not a human probably. The ultimate answer to the question that Can Amazon ALEXA be your friend is a positive and willing, yes but one should never engage too much with the tech knowing that there are real-life humans available to assist them to guide them in various fields of life.
