Discussion: You’ve probably met Siri, one of the first generation of Personal Assistants, or one of her many siblings, such as Alexa, or possibly seen the film “Her”. These software agents will ostensibly know enough about you, and be tirelessly connected and competent enough regarding all things digital, to be your concierge, research assistant, tutor, etc. They are not limited to a mobile existence, but that is where they will shine, brilliantly in your service, at your hand, whenever you need them.
523 Inspiration: Imagine the world for learners when Siri grows up. It will be very soon.
To me, personal assistants that use voice commands is something I am not excited to see the development of. I was excited a few years ago when I would use my Google Home for everything. After a few months, I became too dependent on it and it ended up causing more harm than good when the TV or lights would turn on or music would start playing seemingly by itself. This is why I got rid of all my voice commanded virtual assistants and I don’t think my life is worse off because of it. With that said, I do miss not tripping over a chair every time I need to turn a light on in the dark.
I believe there is so much damage that can happen when developing more advanced voice commanding personal assistants like Siri and Alexa.
Jasmine
I’ve seen tremendous growth in the development of personal assistants. I’m drawing parallels from the rise of the personal device assistant (PDA) in the 90s to what it has become in the last couple of years. This frontier challenges what has been done before and allows for changing education, productivity, and workflow dynamics. We are at the breakthrough status of the next iteration of what personal assistants are capable of. The unpredictability of what is to become makes this an interesting topic for me.
I find this frontier hard to wrap my head around because of the seemingly limitless uses both directly and indirectly connected to education. Since tutor was mentioned in the description, last year I came across a service called “Synthesis Tutor” in a previous semester, a program originally created at SpaceX, that was designed to tutor students on math problems in a limited domain where there is a clear answer to specific problems. In just a year’s time, it appears that this tutoring service has now branched out to tutor in what would be considered “soft skill” areas like communication, strategic thinking, navigating uncertainty etc. I think that’s why I share others comments in saying that this is as exciting as it is terrifying. The rate at which personal assistants can expand their capacity and assist in areas that don’t have one right answer is awesome and hard to predict the long term benefits and risks.
https://www.synthesis.com/tutor?wvideo=5n0lhj6i56
This topic is equally terrifying and fascinating to me. With Chat GPT-4o, the movie her seems like it could soon become a reality. But how will this affect education? Already AI can be a great tool for teachers. I use it to help with assessments, developing lesson plans, IEPs and creating correction pages for simple grammar sheets. However, having an AI personal assistant will add something entirely different to education. They could help students with IEPs (or without!) research, plan and learn. They could entirely replace tutors. In a language class, they could act as a someone who you could have a low risk conversation with. What is concerning is the connection piece of it all. After the pandemic, we all said that it’s evident that technology doesn’t replace educators as the personal relationship part and human connection is so important to students’ learning and development as a person. Nonetheless, if we have AI-based assistants, tutors or even educators who look and act like a human, what is the ethical code for allowing students to connect to them? What are the social or ethical implications if students connect more to their AI-based assistants more than other humans?
To me, this sounds frightening and exciting at the same time. Having used Alexa as a personal assistant for almost 2 years now, I can say that helps me organize things, set meeting reminders and alarms, play songs and create playlists, make to-do lists, shop at Amazon, etc.
AI is set to transform education by handling administrative tasks such as grading and feedback, giving teachers more time to focus on personalized instruction and fostering students’ creative and analytical skills. Teaching will become more efficient with AI-driven adaptive learning systems and intelligent tutors that tailor content to individual student needs. Additionally, AI technologies like virtual reality and machine learning will enhance learning experiences, making them more immersive and interactive.
Reference:
Chen, L., Chen, P., & Lin, Z. (2020). Artificial intelligence in education: A review. IEEE Access, 8, 75264-75278. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2988510
The first version of digital assistants was primarily a hands-free way to access a search engine or basic data entry. There seems to be a lot of opportunity as this becomes combined with enhanced AI language models, making it less of a voice recognition and something closer to a conversation. For education, this can move the use of digital assistants (and LLM AI tools) into more profound implementation: not just searching for topic but asking for expansion, clarification, drilling down to source materials. In a mobile context, combining with location based data or sensors could be very interesting: asking for an explanation of an unknown building, data to explain trends in population and crime in the user’s location, or helping a user understand a complex academic article.
I would be very excited to see technological developments related to this frontier. The ability for students (myself included!) to have a personalized assistant / tutor that can help to organize my schedule, know what music should be played when I need to focus, have a conversation with me, or help me learn…sounds idyllic! What would the role of educators be if all students had a personalized assistant / tutor…? What would be the social implications if students talked to and relied on their AI-based assistants / tutors more than their families or peers…?
OpenAI has leveraged the power of its LLM and “natural human-computer interaction” to absolutely disrupt the chatbot/ assistant world as we know it (Wong, 2024). If you haven’t yet tried ChatGPT’s audio chat functionality, I implore you to try it out yourself. With the updated version of GPT-4o due to arrive to all users in the next few weeks, the anticipation is that the functionality will be even more impressive and natural. This new version will be able to generate and “see” images via your camera. This dramatically impacts language translation needs and those with learning needs that can be limited by typing. The screenshot above of “Her” is ever more relevant today; one can only imagine how these new relationships will evolve! The news is reporting that OpenAI and Apple are in talks to include ChatGPT into iOS 18, speculation is that the new Siri could be powered by this chat model, bringing a dominance over this domain for all iPhone/ Apple users (Smith, 2024).
References:
Smith, C. (2024, May 14). GPT-4o blew my mind, and I really hope Apple brings ChatGPT to iOS 18. BGR. https://bgr.com/tech/gpt-4o-blew-my-mind-and-i-really-hope-apple-brings-chatgpt-to-ios-18/
Wong, M. (2024, May 13). This Is the Next Smartphone Evolution. he Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/openai-gpt4o-siri-iphone/678371/