VentureBeat: Some Alexa Prize chatbots exposed customer data, talked filth. “Millions of users of Amazon’s Echo speakers have grown accustomed to the soothing strains of Alexa, the human-sounding virtual assistant that can tell them the weather, order takeout and handle other basic tasks in response to a voice command. So a customer was shocked last year when Alexa blurted out: ‘Kill your foster parents.'”
chatbots
The Next Web: The $24 billion chatbot industry sucks because it needs better AI
The Next Web: The $24 billion chatbot industry sucks because it needs better AI. “In 2014, WIRED would profile a ‘boring’ company called Slack beginning a media and venture-based obsession with bringing chat to every corner of our work lives. Somewhere along the way, the growth of chat-based enterprise communication was conflated with a preference for doing everything in a chat window, and thus we were given chatbots. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella would go on to call them ‘the new interface,’ and by 2017 over $24 billion in funding had gone into chatbot companies. A year later, and the landscape of chatbot funding is desolate. And it’s because they were never truly built to solve the many, many problems they were supposedly created to fix.”
The Next Web: I built a bot and now I know why bots are so dumb
The Next Web: I built a bot and now I know why bots are so dumb. “I used Azure Bot Service, LUIS, and Azure Functions to build a chatbot that allows me to control an internet connected LIFX lightbulb in my office. I connected it to my work Slack channel so my co-workers could change the color of my desk lamp or turn it on or off. Then I sat back and waited to marvel in the praise of my peers as they were blown away by the sentient life I had birthed. …and I’m still waiting because none of that happened. While the technology worked just fine, I learned that building chatbot interfaces is not something one just does. There are a lot of pitfalls. So you can share in my humiliation, here are some of the lessons I learned building the Lamp Bot.”
Library of Congress: Linking chatbots to collections for place-based storytelling
Library of Congress: Linking chatbots to collections for place-based storytelling. “The following is a guest post from Library of Congress Labs Innovation Intern, Charlie Moffett. In the course of crafting data-driven narratives with digital collections, he created @govislandbot and an open-source mapping tutorial. Below he shares his processes, some of the challenges he encountered, along with the code.”
Search Engine Journal: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Quick Q&A Chatbot
Search Engine Journal: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Quick Q&A Chatbot. “Today we’re going to build a bot, step-by-step, starting with a simple informational bot based on a template create by Microsoft (my employer). Informational bots make it easy for you to quickly get information via simple text-based chat. In this how-to, we’ll create a bot to answer questions defined in a knowledge set or FAQ using QnA Maker and displayed in a Cortana bot using Azure Bot Service. The best part: it will take 30 minutes or less! And, it requires no coding skills!”
Chatbots in museums: hype or opportunity? (Museums and the Web)
Museums and the Web: Chatbots in museums: hype or opportunity? . “Chatbots have caught the headlines recently with businesses starting to adopt them to stimulate conversation with customers. But what are chatbots? How do they work? What can they do for museums and their audiences?”
Adweek: Quartz’s New Chatbot Is Bringing Conversational News to Facebook Messenger
Adweek: Quartz’s New Chatbot Is Bringing Conversational News to Facebook Messenger. “This year’s South by Southwest has been a world filled with over-the-top brand activations, surprise visits from Elon Musk and plenty of new products. Quartz took advantage of the atmosphere of the festival and released Quartz for Messenger on March 8. With its new chatbot, Quartz hopes to deliver the news and other content to users on Facebook’s Messenger.”
