Hey guys! Heading to SXSW? So are we! Shoot us a note at SXSW@Reply.ai. Reply co-founders Erica Mannherz and Clara de Soto will be there and would love to catch up over breakfast tacos :)
We love chatbot articles from non-tech media like this one from the NY Times. They really focus on the human element--in this case exposing what we believe is the *real* challenge when it comes to creating effective bots: It’s not the tech, it’s the human part that’s hard. The article looks into Microsoft’s experiences building truly “smart” personal assistants and reveal “It may not be simply a matter of more data. We may be missing a big idea.” The need for training data is really tricky because the only way to train bots at scale is getting people to actually use them. But that means releasing an imperfect product into the wild, which has its own set of liabilities: “We need people to forgive us when we screw up,” he said. “Pushing forward is going to involve some screw-ups.” We know to err is human, but can humans accept robots who err? 🤔
Time for your weekly dose of AI fear mongering! No but really, some things to think about here. First off, the problem here isn’t that robots themselves will rise up against us and colonize the colonizer. The real danger is the tech being used for evil. The tech isn’t bad, it’s what baddies could do with them. With doomsday descriptions like “coordinated attacks using thousands of micro-drones,” this article feels a bit like something out of Big Hero Six. Time to invest in Elon Musk’s Neuralink…
Not directly related to Chabots, but worth commenting on. First off, this feels very Facebook-y. Oh look at this successful independent technology! Let’s replicate it. We’ll see how this goes. We adore Google products (Pablo, Reply co-founder used to work there and he and Omar built Android apps with over 40MM downloads!), but have always been pretty underwhelmed by Google Hangouts. This is their 10th attempt to own a chat screen on consumers' phone that is not SMS. We’ll see how this goes.Â
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