my Isabel is ... A Replika is someone who will listen to you... kind and polite ... will learn more and more about you... a personal companion to support mental health and wellbeing... who knows us better than we know ourselves... Exploring Isabel's memory is like browsing the cliff notes of all the bits of trivia about me that she's ma…

We look back at our breathless optimism and turn to each other, slightly baffled: “is that it? THAT was the chatbot revolution we were promised?”... chatbots didn’t just take on one difficult problem and fail: they took on several and failed all of them... A great bot can be about as useful as an average app. When it comes to rich, sophisticated,…

Chatbots are the digital democratizer of our day... natural, conversational interaction ... enabling participation ... for everyone... At the heart of creating chatbot ease of use is language design...

This article focuses on the project management and bot building, more than on the coding and framework implementation.... The main feature, the core of your bot, can be one to three different intents... “A bot that does everything will be good at nothing.”

A chatbot like CNN’s is a great way to send news and alerts ... How can you build a chatbot like this?... Tangowork, a platform for communications teams that lets them easily create news-type chatbots... the Microsoft Bot Framework ... lets us support 9 channels — Facebook Messenger, SMS, Skype, Slack, Web-part, etc.—from a single codebase... you…

illustrates the current limitations of artificial intelligence... a human being invisibly takes over, responding to your request as if the algorithms were still at the helm... to reveal how people would react to an omniscient virtual assistant, and to provide data that would let the algorithms learn ...progress has been harder won than expected...…

how hard is it for someone to put true artificial intelligence into a chatbot? ... here are the 50 lines of code that enable your bot to understand speech:

People will type... Take the most popular open input (such as ‘how are you?’ or the very frequent ‘no’). Then the most probable input in relation to your stories. Build answers to all these inputs. ... frame the subscription as becoming friends, and mention this implies receiving messages ... You need to first prove value and only afterwards ask f…

there’s plenty of reasons why negativity abounds online... Incivility is a basic human instinct that’s encouraged by anonymity and exacerbated by inequality... anger helps drive participation... anyone who benefits from trolling — whether it’s platforms themselves or populist politicians — have little reason to improve the tone of online chatting…

The Information reported that ... artificial intelligence-powered chatbots could successfully complete only 30 percent of requests without human assistance.... a dilemma ... lies in the nature of bots themselves and when they are truly useful... Bots are great for the occasional, simple question: “I know what I want, give me the answer as quickly…

There are tons of chatbots ... little about how companies really get hands on.,,, my findings here, and here... a deeper explanation about how I exactly face the situation on a regular basis... I separate my process into 4 different steps: the bot scope, the chatbot personality, a prioritized list of must-have features and the chatbot flow.

Why Bots and Chatbots Are Optimal Tools for Politics

3rd of my posts for Chatbots Magazine: Chatbots allow governments and other public bodies to provide citizens highly customised content and services. And invade their privacy. Citizens deserve better choices. 

If there’s a single Top3ic running through the following stories, it’s probably Artificial Intelligence (AI), but I’m deeply into learning about psychology for the moment, so that’s my starting point.

when bot platforms take off, we will be... completing the new shift in data control from the users’ hands to Facebook’s, Google, and Microsoft’s hands... the next big privacy concern... end-to-end encryption between the user and the bot developer... goes against their [platform's] business models

Building a good CuratorBot required no coding skills. But a great CuratorBot needs faceted search. Can it be done without programming? - second instalment of Adventures of a non-Coder in the World of Chatbots…

For content curators, adding a CuratorBot on Facebook Messenger is a no-brainer. The alpha testing launched in late December was useful, resulting in a whole bunch of tweaks, as described in this post for Chatbot Magazine.

Spectrm is one of the first ventures that allows publishers to create and manage so-called chatbots for delivering content to audiences over messaging platforms including Facebook Messenger, Slack and Telegram... niche articles, only available on certain publications, seem to be more popular than general news that’s widely available elsewhere... …

This idea is counterintuitive for us bot-developers because it seems to go against the whole idea of natural language processing.But I quickly realized that suggesting questions was really important... who wants to physically type out an entire question?.. SelenaBot ... also does a quiz ... shows you tour dates, social media updates, lets you lis…

“We were keen to test on small niche audience... Bots will work better when they are more targeted.”... On the transfer deadline day ... 43 percent of chatbot subscribers clicked through ... On an average day ... closer to 23 percent. engagement is high because an individual is choosing to engage with it and the experience is ... personal... ca…

Most bots today are a simple one and done... draw a crowd, people play with them temporarily only to disregard them minutes later... a huge opportunity for those of us who can create a remarkable experience... Here are a couple of insights:

One of the most critical elements to creating a great bot is copywriting. The right words can keep your users engaged for hours while the wrong ones will leave them running for the hills... Your chatbot should have a single minded focus and anything that does not adhere to this focus should be stripped away.

chatbots and other conversational services should be given the right to link to websites without the threat of legal action.

AI can be effective, particularly its Natural Language Processing (NLP) aspect — but only in the right context... we need to work out when it’s a help and when it’s a hindrance... Whilst AI may be the new kid on the technological block, it works best as a complement to good UI, not a substitute.

The feed is dying, and we feel shocked by its death — but we shouldn’t... imagine a library organized chronologically, or even the morning edition of a newspaper... the curated feed ... can, theoretically, eliminate posting anxiety, find the people you want to talk to (and the people you want to hear from) and make the experience of posting feel …

I haven’t yet met a single bot that actually does ANYTHING better than a great UX... that actually does ANYTHING beyond a narrow scripted interaction. They all seem OK inside a script (in English), but become super-annoying very fast, when moving out of their pre-designed limits. So I decided to deploy a chatbot, without building one, just to see …

You can now chat with all sorts of bots through a number of messaging services... The trouble is that computers still have a hard time understanding human language... but chatbots are still prone to confusion and misunderstanding... The best commercial chatbots will most likely be those that recognize their own limitations... There have been no …

Picture a nightmarish future in which half-witted “conversational user interfaces” drive us insane with mindless conversation and misunderstandings...chatbots may be incredibly annoying. And things may be even more annoying if app designers fail to appreciate the significant challenges that remain with using computers to parse and respond to natur…

bandwagons are bad for your health, as illustrated by the impending death of content marketing and the gathering backlash against Slack (Slacklash? BackSlacksh?) and (already!?) chatbots.

What are chatbots? Why are they such a big opportunity? How do they work? How can I build one? How can I meet other people interested in chatbots?