Items tagged with chatbots
Just a few days prior to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Samsung teased the creation of an artificial human, and it had our minds racing at the possibilities. Turns out the it is not quite what we thought. Samsung subsidiary STAR Labs lifted the curtain on Project NEON, which is essentially a set of digital avatars for glorified chatbots. To be fair, that is soft of an oversimplification. At least, I think it is. In no uncertain terms, STAR Labs says NEON is "not an assistant" like Siri or Alexa, and "not an interface to the internet." It is also "not a music player," in case anyone is confused about that. Simply put, STAR Labs refers to NEON as "a friend," albeit a virtual...
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Amazon's voice activated digital assistant known as Alexa has matured fast since it was first introduced, gaining thousands of new skills and forming strategic partnerships with the likes of Domino's Pizza and Uber. Now Amazon is offering up the same underlying technology that powers Alexa to developers so they can build conversational bots, or chatbots, that understand natural language. The service is called Amazon Lex. It allows developers to easily build conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. What developers get with Amazon Lex are the advanced deep learning functionalities of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language...
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Microsoft's been on a mission to bring a series of artificially intelligent chatbots to its Skype service as a way to enhance Skype and offer new experiences. That effort continues today with the introduction several more Skype Bots, including Spock, who can help you learn the ways of Vulcan logic (or provide a distraction from work). This whole bot thing kicked off in April when Microsoft rolled out a series of preview Skype Bots. They've been well received and there are now over 30,000 developers building bots on the Skype platform, with thousands able to share their bots through a Skype join link directly on their website. That's pretty incredible for such a short amount of time. Part of the...
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At its Build conference this past spring, Microsoft unveiled the latest killer feature for its Skype service: Chatbots. Chatbots are bots, as the name implies, that can chat intelligently with users to give them the information they're looking for quickly and easily. While customer service is a focal point of many chatbots, we've likely yet to see the full potential of these natural language-equipped AI beings. In fact, we've yet to see the full potential of chatbot adoption, too. In a recent blog post, Microsoft notes that an impressive 30,000 developers have begun working with Skype's chatbots feature since it was announced, and given that initial surge, the company isn't planning to slow...
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Facebook’s chatbot functionality for Messenger launched over two months ago to great fanfare, and the company is now ready to deliver its first major update for the platform. In case you haven’t been keeping up with the latest on Facebook Messenger, chatbots allow you to access sports scores, order flowers, inquire about flight information or get the latest weather updates (among other things). Since chatbots were introduced at F8, over 23,000 developers have signed up to use Facebook’s Wit.ai bot engine and over 11,000 bots have been deployed. To help developers and Messenger users get a better grasp of chatbots and to make them easier to interact with, Facebook has added a raft of...
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Even though Google is much more than a search company these days -- and that's especially true if you include Alphabet, the recently formed parent outfit that oversees many of Google's side businesses and technologies -- leveraging its expertise in search can help set its services apart. In fact, that how it plans to make a comeback in mobile messaging.Google already owns and operates a pair of messaging services, those being Hangouts and Messenger. However, they're also-rans in the messaging space that's dominated by Facebook's WeChat and Messenger, and Tencent's WeChat, which is the top messaging service in China. That doesn't sit right with Google.Apparently Google's answer is to build a new...
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There's just got to be a joke that begins, "Two chatbots walk into a bar ..." because when chatbots talk, it's funny. Cornell University researchers wanted to see what would happen when two chatbots talked to one another. So they rigged up two systems that would allow instances of the chatbot Cleverbot to interact. It doesn't take long for the two to begin arguing, to hold a conversation about God and to express their wishes that they could have body. A chatbot is a computer program that memorizes phrases and snippets from conversations to simulate human interaction. When people engage it in conversation, it tries to trick humans into thinking they are actually talking to another...
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