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I talked to Zo for most of the plane ride home from Seattle, where I’d just spent the day with the people responsible for developing her. Chatting with her, I quickly discovered, can sometimes feel like talking to a mildly capricious child, like when, out of the blue, she tells me to “quit creepin’!” But Zo’s replies often sound sharp, relevant, and funny. When she doesn’t have the knowledge to talk about a particular topic, she’ll say “let’s talk about something else.” Other times, her replies seem like reports from a world only Zo knows. Sometimes you connect with her and sometimes you don’t.
Like many other chatbots–think the Domino’s pizza bot (on Facebook Messenger), which takes your pizza order and your money, or Microsoft’s surprisingly foulmouthed Twitter bot Tay–Zo is a work in progress. She’s also meant to be one of the torchbearers of a new kind of computing.
Everyone at Microsoft remembers when CEO Satya Nadella declared that “bots are the new apps.” It was at the company’s annual Build conference last year, and it accompanied the launch of the Microsoft Bot Framework, a platform on which developers both inside and outside Microsoft could build bots for a variety of environments, from Skype to Alexa to Facebook Messenger. A batch of plug-and-play cognitive tools would allow them to leverage the company’s extensive research in AI....
A behind-the-scenes encounter with Microsoft’s most promising current and future bots, and the humans who are trying to make them as common as apps.