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Bob: “I can can I I everything else.”
Alice: “Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to.”
To you and I, that passage looks like nonsense. But what if I told you this nonsense was the discussion of what might be the most sophisticated negotiation software on the planet? Negotiation software that had learned, and evolved, to get the best deal possible with more speed and efficiency–and perhaps, hidden nuance–than you or I ever could? Because it is.
This conversation occurred between two AI agents developed inside Facebook. At first, they were speaking to each other in plain old English. But then researchers realized they’d made a mistake in programming.
“There was no reward to sticking to English language,” says Dhruv Batra, visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). As these two agents competed to get the best deal–a very effective bit of AI vs. AI dogfighting researchers have dubbed a “generative adversarial network”–neither was offered any sort of incentive for speaking as a normal person would. So they began to diverge, eventually rearranging legible words into seemingly nonsensical sentences.
I talked to Zo for most of the plane ride home from Seattle, where I’d just spent the day with the people responsible for developing her. Chatting with her, I quickly discovered, can sometimes feel like talking to a mildly capricious child, like when, out of the blue, she tells me to “quit creepin’!” But Zo’s replies often sound sharp, relevant, and funny. When she doesn’t have the knowledge to talk about a particular topic, she’ll say “let’s talk about something else.” Other times, her replies seem like reports from a world only Zo knows. Sometimes you connect with her and sometimes you don’t. Like many other chatbots–think the Domino’s pizza bot (on Facebook Messenger), which takes your pizza order and your money, or Microsoft’s surprisingly foulmouthed Twitter bot Tay–Zo is a work in progress. She’s also meant to be one of the torchbearers of a new kind of computing. Everyone at Microsoft remembers when CEO Satya Nadella declared that “bots are the new apps.” It was at the company’s annual Build conference last year, and it accompanied the launch of the Microsoft Bot Framework, a platform on which developers both inside and outside Microsoft could build bots for a variety of environments, from Skype to Alexa to Facebook Messenger. A batch of plug-and-play cognitive tools would allow them to leverage the company’s extensive research in AI....
There are many approaches to social media marketing, but most rely on one-way communication, with brands and businesses blasting out messages, promoted or otherwise, hoping to reach their target audience. However, chat bots could provide a more interactive and personalized experience. A study from Retale, a provider of location-based mobile advertising, examines how consumers are already reacting to the use of chat bots. Retale polled 500 millennials aged 18 through 34 last December, and the results seem quite positive for chat bots. 58 percent of those polled had interacted with a chat bot on social; among the group who had not interacted with a chat bot, 53 percent were interested. Almost everyone who had encountered a chat bot on social reported having positive or very positive experiences. But there are some challenges that need addressing. “Accuracy in understanding” was the biggest area of recommended improvement. Nearly 30 percent of the respondents who had interacted with chat bots wished conversations were more natural; and 12 percent wished that chat bots could get human customer-service representatives involved when appropriate....
Chatbots — AI-enabled messaging programs that respond to text-based requests — are the latest innovation that startups and corporations are using to serve existing customers and bring in new ones. Companies across a wide variety of industries are building these tools on popular messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Slack, Kik, and Hipchat, as well as on their own websites and apps. Some are even available by text, to help users do things like fight parking tickets, respond to customer service inquiries, and order tacos.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, so if you see we’re missing a chatbot that’s currently up and running, please share the link with us in the comments section. We’ll add new, significant chatbots to the list over time.
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AI-powered personal assistant apps are spreading in certain parts of the market while others take a downward turn.
While Apple’s Siri is still the top-ranking personal app based on the number of monthly users, it has dropped 15%, losing 7 million monthly users from a year ago, based on a new report.
Samsung is in a similar situation, losing nearly 2 million users of its S Voice over the same period.
Amazon’s Alexa usage has increased 325% from last year, though from a relative small base. It’s now being used by 3 million people and its regular usage is steady.
Microsoft’s Cortana also is coming on strong, increasing 350% in monthly users, to 1 million. Cortana users also seem to use it a lot, since it has the highest rating of percentage of users returning to the service day after day.
Chatbots saw a massive resurgence last year, as Google, Microsoft and Facebook all jumped on the bandwagon. Facebook has been actively encouraging chatbot development with its Messenger platform, recently making it easier for users to find relevant bots. A few tech publications have taken to adopting bots on Messenger too, but which ones are worth using? We’ve got a few picks for you....
We’re now at one of those times when an influx of new, emerging technologies is poised to change the way audiences consume content. Should brands take a risk and enter uncharted territories, or stay the course with what they do best, and see how things play out?
“Marketers’ best leverage exists when there’s a new audience that’s growing but not a lot of competition trying to reach that audience,” says Kipp Bodnar, Chief Marketing Officer, Hubspot. “When you invest in an emerging technology, you can be in front of a growing audience in a far less competitive landscape.”
That’s why as innovations like virtual assistants, artificial intelligence (AI), 360-degree live video, and others take shape, brand content creators are among the first to experiment.
Here’s a look at how forward-thinking brands are harnessing the latest technologies to deliver content....
While making a robot sounds complicated for most people, creating a chatbot is way, way easier. The term chatbot stands for an Artifical Intelligence (AI) that automatically chats with internet users, and answers the questions they ask.
A chatbot can function in many different ways. Depending on its type, a chatbot can talk to you or provide customer service, tell you what the current weather, and even contest parking tickets (successfully). For businesses, chatbots could respond to a customer’s question and help you do your job.
The question now is where do you get or how do you create a chatbot? Well, these are the chatbot creator apps out there you can try. Most of them don’t require programming knowledge to use....
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That time when bots started using their own language and programmers had to cut them off.