bots
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Apple acqui-hired the team from messaging assistant Init.ai to work on Siri
Earlier this week, a small startup called Init.ai announced that it soon would be discontinuing its service — a smart assistant for customer representatives to parse and get better insights from their interactions with users, as well as automate some of the interactions — because the team was (according to a notice on the site) “joining a project that touches the lives of… Read More
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Researcher Emilio Ferrara talks about the rise of fake news and botnets
Emilio Ferrara has been thinking about botnets for over a decade. As the first social networks climbed out of the mire, he noticed that they were very easy to game. Now, it seems, all of those early tools have finally been weaponized.
I spoke to Ferrara about his research work as well as his fascinating study that found that Twitter bots can be used for good. In this episode of Technopia we… Read More
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Researchers find that Twitter bots can be used for good
According to Emilio Ferrara, a USC Information Sciences Institute researcher, not all Twitter bots are born bad. He should know. Ferrara created a “large-scale experiment designed to analyze the spread of information on social networks” and found that “good” tweets spread just as quickly as bad tweets. Further, they confirmed something the we already know: that… Read More
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Silent Echo lets you chat with Alexa over Slack
Want to chat with Alexa via Slack? A new bot called Silent Echo now makes that possible. The idea is that there are times when you want to interact with Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa, but you don’t want to do it by voice. For example, if things are too noisy in the room for Alexa to properly hear you, or, alternately, if you need things to be very quiet. The service… Read More
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Freshdesk owner Freshworks acquires Joe Hukum as it plans a move into chatbots
After raising $55 million last year to build its business beyond its existing help desk services, today Freshworks (the parent company of Freshdesk) has made an acquisition to help it fill out that strategy. The company has acquired Joe Hukum, a startup out of India that offers a platform for businesses to build their own chatbots. I’ve asked, but the companies are not revealing any terms… Read More
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At AI bot startups, cool kids rule
You would think at least one AI-powered humanoid bot would have a properly nerdy name. Maybe a Poindexter or Hildegarde to add some natural language processing to your customer chat app? No such luck. Instead, it sounds like the cool kids are in charge at most digital assistant and bot startups. Think short, peppy names that top the popular baby name lists. There’s Aiden and Riley putting… Read More
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Twitter chatbots can now include buttons that push you to tweet, follow, click & more
Twitter today is rolling out a new feature that will allow businesses to prompt their followers to take an action beyond a simple fav or retweet. The company is introducing the ability for businesses to add buttons inside their direct message conversations designed to encourage customers to do things like tweet about the company’s Twitter bot, visit their website, follow the… Read More
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As Messenger’s bots lose steam, Facebook pushes menus over chat
Facebook’s Messenger bots may not be having the impact the social network desired. Just yesterday, online retailer Everlane, one of the launch partners for the bot platform, announced it was ditching Messenger for customer notifications and returning to email. Following this, Facebook today announced an upgraded Messenger Platform, which introduces a new way for users to interact with… Read More
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RASA NLU gives developers an open source solution for natural language processing
For better or worse, 2016 was another year of bots. I probably got more pitches for bot startups than anything else. And yet, bots are far from hitting their stride. If we hope to break beyond the rigid functionality of today’s tools, a prerequisite is going to be giving bot developers a bit more open source love.
RASA NLU, a new open source API from… Read More
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Apple patent shows Siri inside iMessage to help with scheduling, payments and more
Google’s smart virtual helper Google Assistant is finding its way into everything from the company’s chat app Allo to Pixel smartphones and its Amazon Echo rival, Google Home. Now it appears that Apple is considering following suit in at least one of those areas. A newly unearthed Apple patent indicates the company is looking into integrating Siri into its own messaging platform… Read More
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