Lawyers today are overwhelmed with information. 3 million new laws get published every single year. Currently, lawyers use legal search engines that have confusing user interfaces, require complicated search syntax, and return thousands of irrelevant results. ROSS Intelligence build artificially intelligence tools to enhance lawyer's abilities which allow them to do more than was ever humanly possible before. Lawyers can send ROSS their research questions by email, and it will use machine learning and natural language understanding techniques like deep learning, entity-relational analysis, and deep dependency parsing to read the law and find their answers. It is the world's first artificially intelligent lawyer.
Jimoh Ovbiagele, CTO & Co-Founder at ROSS Intelligence, will be presenting at the Virtual Assistant Summit in San Francisco on 26-27 January. Jimoh will be discussing the artificially intelligent tools ROSS Intelligence build to enhance lawyer's abilities and will focus on how some of the techniques can be used to create natural interfaces to find information. We caught up with Jimoh ahead of the event to find out his thoughts on the uptake of virtual assistants, which industries he thinks will be most disrupted by this technology and the future of virtual assistants. What do you feel are the leading factors enabling recent advancements and uptake of virtual assistants?
I believe recent advancements in virtual assistants have been driven by the growing supply of A.I. components. A.I. component makers are what steel suppliers were to building skyscrapers in the 19th century. If everyone building a skyscraper needed to produce their own steel, New York City would be flat today. We have two sayings at ROSS Intelligence: “stand on the shoulders of giants” and “build what doesn’t exist”.
I think consumer demand has been driven by the promise of convenience and personalization. The ability to tell a virtual assistant, “bring me to a new restaurant in the neighbourhood that my girlfriend would like and I haven’t been to before,” and have it research, book a reservation and hail an Uber is game changing.
On the other hand, the business world is driven by what it has always been... competition. Businesses have an abundance of information today, but they haven’t had the right tools to make use of it. Forward-looking companies have recognized how virtual assistants can help them distil all this information and enable them to make better and faster decisions to beat their competitors.
Which industries do you feel will be most disrupted by virtual assistants, and artificial intelligence in general, in the future?
The legal industry is ripe for disruption. Law firms do a lot of dull and mechanical work behind the scenes. Virtual assistants can help perform these activities and reduce the production cost, time, and quality of legal services.
Law firms who use virtual assistants will disrupt those who don’t. These are the firms we are working with today at ROSS Intelligence.
What do you feel is essential to future progress?
I think basic A.I. education is essential to the progress of virtual assistants. There are infinite problems that I think we can already solve today, however, there’s an under-supply of people with the training to do so.
In your opinion, are we ready for emotional AI?
In my opinion, I don’t think we need emotional A.I.’s yet. We need virtual assistants that just get the basics done.
What has driven you to work on virtual assistants?
When my parents separated, I watched my mom struggle with the legal bills. That’s when I realized that legal services weren’t affordable for most people. I came up with the idea for ROSS to help make legal services more affordable for people and business around the world.
Join us for the third global Virtual Assistant Summit in San Francisco, 26-27 January. This summit will be running alongside the Deep Learning Summit.
Discover the opportunities of advancing trends in virtual assistants and their impact on business and society from a global line-up of experts including: Alonso Martinez, Technical Director at Pixar Animation Studios; Anjuli Kannan, Software Engineer at Google and Dennis Mortensen, CEO and Founder at x.ai.
Topics will cover: Neural Networks, Deep Learning, Predictive Intelligence, Data Mining, Voice Recognition, Natural Language Processing, Anticipatory Computing and Home Automation.
Register here now before the tickets sell out!