AI helps humans best when humans help AI
Artificial intelligence is a growing field, aimed at improving the lives of humans. Yet, as it stands, AI needs help and guidance from humans to learn. Wired analyses an AI system called Clara. According to the makers of Clara it is "The first intelligent, natural language interface that feels human, a virtual employee you can depend on." Although Clara has been out for a while, it is another example of the growing number of personal assistance programs that are being commercialised, such as Apple's Siri or Facebook's M. However, despite being useful, both M and Clara need human intervention when approving certain tasks. Although the technology is smart, Wired concludes it is still heavily reliant on human help. 

I signed up for Clara last week.

Clara's creators bill it as "the first intelligent, natural language interface that feels human---a virtual employee you can depend on." Starting today, after months of private testing, it's available to the world at large. I first noticed it about a year ago, when Techcrunch, the popular tech tabloid, said the company behind the tool, Clara Labs, had landed some funding from big-name venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.

The question is how to get to that nirvana where a machine can do everything and do it well.

I emailed the young Silicon Valley startup, but founder Maran Nelson told me the company wasn't ready for press. She got back in touch last week, inviting me to sign up. I did, and it's an intriguing thing---in part because it demonstrates the growing pains of modern AI. You see those same pains with, say, Apple's Siri or the digital assistant Facebook is testing with a small number of people in the San Francisco Bay Area. AI has come a long way, but it still needs human help.

As it stands today, Clara helps coordinate meetings---via email---and generally manages your online calendar. When you're trying to set up a phone meeting with someone, you cc: Clara, and the tool arranges a time that works for everyone and mails calendar invites. You also can ask it to add a meeting to your calendar, something I did just minutes before writing this sentence. Diede van Lamoen, who juggles myriad phone meetings each week, chatting with people across the globe, has used the tool for a year, and he says it saves him enormous amounts of time. "It's been a godsend," he says. "I can outsource all the scheduling."

For me, it worked well enough, though I'm not sure how much time it saves. And it occasionally screws up. The same can be said for any digital assistant, and, well, humans screw up too. For a while there, Clara wasn't getting my time zone right, and apparently, that was my fault. I'd signed up with the wrong time zone. With Clara, the larger point is this digital assistant doesn't just serve humans. It's driven by humans, at least in part---humans who take the "virtual" out of "virtual assistant."

'Why Did This Person...?'

The company website says Clara is "powered by machine intelligence and trained by executive assistants." Nelson says humans (independent contractors working in locations around the world) don't just train the system but, in certain situations, take control of it. When you send Clara an email, Nelson says, the system analyzes it in an effort to generate a response, and it then sends this analysis to a human for approval. And if a task falls outside of what the machine can do, the human will take over. A contractor will, say, respond to you with a long involved email.

At one point, when Nelson and I attempted to arrange a meeting, Clara offered a time that didn't make complete sense, and later, Nelson inadvertently sent me an email thread in which she had worked to solve the problem. This showed the human involvement.

"Why did this person offer times that are very obviously not tomorrow?" she had written to a support technician. "That is not cool."

"This was cra-60," the technician wrote, giving the contractors online handle before identifying him name and providing the name of his "coach." "Clara error---oversight of customer instruction. Reported in mistakes widget now."