The present and future of AI (artificial intelligence)

Technology involving AI (artificial intelligence) has advanced dramatically in recent years and we are now in the "third AI boom." AI has been the subject of research and development (R&D) for more than 50 years, but now, concurrent to the R&D, it is also in the phase of "utilization and implementation in the real world." In fact, AI is used in many different fields, ranging from fields related to everyday life to industrial fields.

AI related R&D themes in NTT Group include image and speech recognition that mimics the human senses of "seeing" and "hearing," and spoken dialogue systems that also make decisions and take actions. However, we need to break away from such conventional AI approaches that mainly find and learn correlations in data and "evolve" into a novel AI that "thinks" like a human in the true sense. We believe that such "thinking AI" must understand and process "values." It then must have the "tolerance" to recognize the diversity of values, and the "conscientiousness" to respond with both consistency and flexibility based on such diversity. We aim to make such "thinking AI" support people in every aspect of their daily lives, work, and lifestyles.