Communications Technology

The Wall Street Journal reported Google is planning to launch an online music downloading service tied to its search engine, a move that would pit it against Apple and its popular iTunes site.

Google’s plans are still vague, but it has been “stepping up conversations” about offering music services online as well as over mobile phones that use its Android operating system, the Journal said, citing people familiar with the company’s talks with the music industry.

It was unclear whether Google had signed deals with record labels, the report said, adding that the launch of a music downloading store was still months away.

In a post today, mashable.com reports such a system has been touted for a while within Google.

“At Google I/O, Google showed off technology that would allow Android users to stream music off of their desktop computers right on to their phones. That’s very cool and offers a glimpse of what a cloud-based subscription service may offer. While Android can support direct over-the-air purchasing from the Amazon MP3 store, the overall music player and music experience still doesn’t quite have the finesse of iTunes and its integrated multi-device solution,” the post says.

Google and Apple have become competitors since the launch of Google’s Android operating system, a rival to Apple’s iPhone.

Google was not available for comment.

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It’s true! The person you have been chatting to online possesses robot like characteristics. A new generation of artificially intelligent agents is appearing on websites globally, answering questions about everything from opening a bank account to booking a flight or joining the US military.

Based on artificial intelligence (AI) technology from US company Next IT the US Army’s Sergeant Star can answer basic questions about life in the service. The technology has also been used to create artificial personas for Alaska Airlines, Continental Airlines and a range of other websites, complete with names and faces.

According to the founder and chief executive of Next IT, Fred Brown, his company’s mission is to change how humans and computers interact. “There’s a huge need for this, because as technology grows and becomes more and more complex with more and more information, there has to be a way to simplify that and make it more adaptable and more personalised,” he says.

The goal is to provide a better experience for customers. Brown says Alaskan Airlines moved from fourth place to first in a national customer service ranking in the US airline industry after installing its AI application, dubbed Jenn.

“We are helping customers with complex products and technology and services, figuring out appropriate offers for up-selling and cross-selling,” Brown says.

In Australia, the National Australia Bank is using the technology from local developer MyCyberTwin so consumers can chat to an artificial agent about credit cards and home loans and for help with internet banking. The NAB’s general manager of online, Chris Smith, says hundreds of thousands of chat sessions have already taken place between the NAB online assistant (who has a face but no name) and customers.

Smith says the technology enables customers to get answers after call centres have closed. About one-third of the interactions occur outside of business hours. “If you are overseas and want a question answered, you can get answers 24/7,” he says. “There is a whole generation that has grown up with Facebook and live chat, and banks need to be there. We need to be communicating the way that customers want to communicate.”

Smith says most feedback has been positive, although “some people said they prefer to talk to people one-on-one, some want email but a large percentage wanted to have live or automated chat”.

“It’s a statement by the bank that we are keen to communicate with people who are interested in this channel, which maybe traditionally banks don’t use,” he says.

The founder and chief executive officer of MyCyberTwin, Liesl Capper-Beilby, says her company has supplied Cybercafes to publishers, other financial institutions and even NASA. Many customers say they like talking with AI agents, as the process was less of an interruption than making a phone call, and 65 per cent of users would have phoned a call centre if the CyberTwin option did not exist.

“The answer is coming in seconds and it is actually more accurate than the human channel,” Capper-Beilby says. “Humans are not consistent, they say things depending on their mood and they can’t remember 5000 pieces of information like a CyberTwin can.”

While the CyberTwin can take between 12 hours to six weeks to program, Capper-Beilby says its implementations have demonstrated up to 94 per cent accuracy.

“We are able to get high accuracy because the system self-learns,” she says.

Brown does not expect artificial intelligent agents to replace human call-centre operators but their presence would free humans to take on more interesting work.

“I don’t think computers have intuition or a soul,” Brown says. “You can teach them to be polite and courteous but what about compassion and empathy?

“And those things are very important to how you feel. Sometimes you just want to interact with another soul.”

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US President Obama would be granted powers to seize control of and even shut down the internet under a new bill that describes the global internet as a US “national asset”. Local lobby groups and academics have rounded on the plan, saying that, rather than combat terrorists, it would actually do them “the biggest favour ever” by terrorising the rest of the world, which is now heavily reliant on cyberspace.

Independent senator Joe Lieberman, who is chairman of the US Homeland Security committee proposed the legislation into the US Senate and seeks to grant the President broad emergency powers over the internet in times of national emergency.

Titled “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act”, the bill stipulates any internet firms and providers must “immediately comply with any emergency measure or action developed” by a new section of the US Department of Homeland Security, dubbed the “National Centre for Cybersecurity and Communications”.

Lobby group TechAmerica told ZDNet it worried that the bill would give the US “absolute power” over the internet and create “unintended consequences”. One of Australia’s top communications experts, University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt, railed against the idea, saying shutting down the internet would “inflict an enormous damage on the entire world”.

He said it would be like giving a single country “the right to poison the atmosphere, or poison the ocean”.

“All our financial systems, all our security systems … we’re so reliant on the internet that if you shut it down there’s a question of whether society will continue to operate normally anywhere in the Western world,” Landfeldt said in a phone interview.

“By doing this they would do the terrorists the biggest favour ever because they would terrorise the rest of the world”.

Landfeldt said the US would be the only country in the world with the ability to shut down the internet. He said such a move would be extremely difficult for the US to justify to other nations.

“Unfortunately, too much of the core of the internet resides in the US - let’s put it this way, they cannot shut down machines in Australia, but they can completely isolate us and shut down certain core functions like the DNS … they can render the internet fairly useless for the rest of the world,” he said.

Senator Susan Collins, co-sponsor of the bill, has said: “We cannot afford to wait for a cyber-9/11.” Lieberman argued the bill was necessary to “preserve those networks and assets and our country and protect our people”.

He said that, for all its allure, the internet could also be a “dangerous place with electronic pipelines that run directly into everything from our personal bank accounts to key infrastructure to government and industrial secrets”.

US economic security, national security and public safety were now all at risk from new kinds of enemies, including “cyber warriors, cyber spies, cyber terrorists and cyber criminals”.

Geordie Guy, spokesman for the online users’ lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said governments around the world seemed terrified of some unidentified risk that they believe the internet poses.

“The proposal is from Joe Lieberman, a repeat offender on rights versus regulation, in a bill called Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010,” he said.

“One wonders which nation Senator Lieberman considers the internet an asset of, and how proposing its destruction by presidential or homeland security order protects it.

“The internet is not a national asset of the United States, nor is it a media regulation problem of Australia. It is an international network used by millions upon millions of citizens and it needs to remain free and available.”

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy did not respond to calls requesting comment. Google, one of the world’s biggest internet companies, declined to comment as it was not yet official US government policy.

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