Artificial Intelligence Future-ready with digital voice assistants

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Handling voice assistants like Alexa, Siri and Co. independently and efficiently—that's the goal of a new online training platform. The offer has been developed by a research team at the University of Würzburg. It is aimed at everyone who deals with voice assistants and AI in their everyday life or will deal with them.

Voice assistants are now a permanent part of our everyday lives, but many users lack an understanding of how they work. This often leads to misunderstandings and unrealistic expectations that can quickly cause frustration. Risks to privacy that can come with the use of such tools are also often overlooked.

To tackle these challenges, a team of scientists at Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg (JMU) has now developed a digital training platform aimed at promoting key skills in dealing with language-based artificial intelligence (AI). Experts from media psychology, data science, and the psychology of intelligent interactive systems were involved. The name of their project: Digital Interaction Competence—Monitor, Training and Visibility, or in short: Motiv.

The goal of this platform is to promote a confident and conscious approach to interactive AI systems without false notions and expectations.

Carolin Wienrich, Professor of Psychology of Intelligent Interactive Systems at JMU

Structure and contents of the online training platform

The online training platform from Motiv includes six training modules that explain the function and operation of voice assistants and delve into the underlying artificial intelligence among other things. Each module is made up of learning-psychology optimized and easily understandable learning texts, learning videos, and interactive tasks. At the end of each module, learners have the opportunity to test their knowledge in small quizzes. There is also a chatbot, currently in development, which can assist with questions on the learning topic.

Personalized learning experiences and free access

The platform enables personalized learning experiences through a recommendation system that is based on an interest test and optionally on the usage data of the voice assistants. In doing so, the privacy of the users is fully ensured, as the shared data are processed exclusively locally, on the learners' PC.

The training modules are free to access and scientifically evaluated. In this way, Motiv aims to enable as broad a society as possible to handle voice assistants competently and autonomously. The goal is to prepare as many people as possible for the opportunities and challenges of speech-based AI systems in a world increasingly shaped by AI.

The offer is aimed at all those interested, from teenagers to adults, who may face the challenge of working with AI in their professional lives.

The project is funded by the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt).