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In April 2016, something happened at Facebook that would quickly result in a revolutionary paradigm shift on the horizon of online communication -- from mobile to desktop, marketing to services, personal to corporate -- everything, really. Messenger opened its doors to developers with an invitation to create chatbots -- something of which roughly 78% of online adults were unaware. Within six months, developers had created about 30,000 active Messenger bots. Today, less than a year later, that number is up 233%, with 100,000 active bots on the platform. But it’s not just a popular, funky thing to do. Businesses using chatbots are seeing results, like Sephora, which reportedly earns “an average spend of over $50 from clients who have booked an in-store service via its Messenger assistant,” according to VentureBeat....
AI-powered personal assistant apps are spreading in certain parts of the market while others take a downward turn.
While Apple’s Siri is still the top-ranking personal app based on the number of monthly users, it has dropped 15%, losing 7 million monthly users from a year ago, based on a new report.
Samsung is in a similar situation, losing nearly 2 million users of its S Voice over the same period.
Amazon’s Alexa usage has increased 325% from last year, though from a relative small base. It’s now being used by 3 million people and its regular usage is steady.
Microsoft’s Cortana also is coming on strong, increasing 350% in monthly users, to 1 million. Cortana users also seem to use it a lot, since it has the highest rating of percentage of users returning to the service day after day.
Chatbots saw a massive resurgence last year, as Google, Microsoft and Facebook all jumped on the bandwagon. Facebook has been actively encouraging chatbot development with its Messenger platform, recently making it easier for users to find relevant bots. A few tech publications have taken to adopting bots on Messenger too, but which ones are worth using? We’ve got a few picks for you....
According to a study from Oxford University and the Oxford Martin School, 47% of jobs in the United States are "at risk" of becoming "automated in the next 20 years." PwC has similar findings, estimating that 38% of U.S. jobs are at risk of being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence in the next 15 years. And while two-thirds of Americans believe robots will take over most of the workforce in the next 50 years, they're also in denial: 80% say their job will "probably" or "definitely" be around in five decades. Here are five robots that are coming to take some jobs from unsuspecting humans....
Via Marc Wachtfogel, Ph.D.
USA TODAY LAST WEEK REPORTED that Facebook was breaking up an “extensive fake account scam” targeting publisher pages with false “likes.” The ruse apparently was intended to yield the scammers more friends they could later spam, and USA Today added that it was “among the publishers impacted.” Not included in its report was the fact the news organization was the central target of the scam, which decimated USA Today’s topline Facebook metrics. Whereas some other major outlets saw follower counts dip by hundreds of thousands of “likes” following Facebook’s bot purge, USA Today’s main page lost an estimated 5.8 million such followers between April 13 and April 15, according to CrowdTangle data. It slashed the page’s following by more than a third, and it came in addition to massive decreases in “likes” at other USA Today-affiliated pages, such as USA Today Sports. Taken together, the Virginia-based news organization saw its collective Facebook follower total plummet by nearly 12 million essentially overnight. The army of fake accounts was more than double the number of “likes” on The Washington Post’s main page....
There are many approaches to social media marketing, but most rely on one-way communication, with brands and businesses blasting out messages, promoted or otherwise, hoping to reach their target audience. However, chat bots could provide a more interactive and personalized experience. A study from Retale, a provider of location-based mobile advertising, examines how consumers are already reacting to the use of chat bots. Retale polled 500 millennials aged 18 through 34 last December, and the results seem quite positive for chat bots. 58 percent of those polled had interacted with a chat bot on social; among the group who had not interacted with a chat bot, 53 percent were interested. Almost everyone who had encountered a chat bot on social reported having positive or very positive experiences. But there are some challenges that need addressing. “Accuracy in understanding” was the biggest area of recommended improvement. Nearly 30 percent of the respondents who had interacted with chat bots wished conversations were more natural; and 12 percent wished that chat bots could get human customer-service representatives involved when appropriate....
As brand apps lose their luster, marketers need to reassess how they connect with consumers in a mobile-first world. Chatbots are one way they can speak with consumers one-on-one in a place where they are already spending the bulk of their time.
“Chatbots will replace the search window,” said Will Wiseman, chief strategy officer, PHD U.S. “There will be a rapid decline in app usage. The last three years, we have gone from brands’ desire to have mobile-friendly websites, then apps, and [we] now expect to see app activity get cannibalized by bots.”
But before you get chatty, here are some basics on bots....
While making a robot sounds complicated for most people, creating a chatbot is way, way easier. The term chatbot stands for an Artifical Intelligence (AI) that automatically chats with internet users, and answers the questions they ask.
A chatbot can function in many different ways. Depending on its type, a chatbot can talk to you or provide customer service, tell you what the current weather, and even contest parking tickets (successfully). For businesses, chatbots could respond to a customer’s question and help you do your job.
The question now is where do you get or how do you create a chatbot? Well, these are the chatbot creator apps out there you can try. Most of them don’t require programming knowledge to use....
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In this episode, I interview Ben Beck, a bot expert who writes a weekly column for ClearVoice.com. He has an online course focused on generating leads with chatbots. Ben explores what you need to know to get started with chatbots. You’ll discover the best tools for creating chatbots....
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....
Since Facebook and Kik debuted their chatbot channels last year, thousands of bots have been built by brands, media companies and developers on the platforms, with more expected in 2017. (Just last week, Facebook unveiled its Messenger 2.0, with brands like Subway, Aeromexico and Food Network coming onboard.) However, while bots might seem like just another extension on social media, there is still a lot to figure out in terms of performance and measurement. And just like the early days of social media, understanding what clicks and what doesn’t is still a work in progress. “When we were creating chatbots and thinking about it as a new medium, we wanted to go back to the drawing board to assess how these things should be measured,” said Kik product manager Laura Newton. “Although bots are still a niche product and aren’t super widespread, they cover a vast variety of use cases and we think they need to be treated different.”...
A planning editor with the Fort Collins Coloradoan is experimenting with bot technology and it’s taught her that it doesn’t require a team of technologists. Jennifer Hefty says it doesn’t even require HTML coding experience. Relying on research, a free bot interface and resources already in the newsroom, Hefty built and launched her first bot, dubbed Elexi, prior to the November 2016 elections to provide audiences with the necessary information to become more informed voters. Hefty was inspired to bring the technology to her newsroom after learning more about bots at the Online News Association annual conference in September 2016. With positive feedback from the first experiment, she’s getting ready to launch her next bot experiment....
IGOR MORDATCH IS working to build machines that can carry on a conversation. That’s something so many people are working on. In Silicon Valley, chatbot is now a bona fide buzzword. But Mordatch is different. He’s not a linguist. He doesn’t deal in the AI techniques that typically reach for language. He’s a roboticist who began his career as an animator. He spent time at Pixar and worked on Toy Story 3, in between stints as an academic at places like Stanford and the University of Washington, where he taught robots to move like humans. “Creating movement from scratch is what I was always interested in,” he says. Now, all this expertise is coming together in an unexpected way. As detailed in a research paper published by OpenAI this week, Mordatch and his collaborators created a world where bots are charged with completing certain tasks, like moving themselves to a particular landmark. The world is simple, just a big white square—all of two dimensions—and the bots are colored shapes: a green, red, or blue circle. But the point of this universe is more complex. The world allows the bots to create their own language as a way of collaborating, helping each other complete those tasks. All this happens through what’s called reinforcement learning, the same fundamental technique that underpinned AlphaGo, the machine from Google’s DeepMind AI lab that cracked the ancient game of Go. Basically, the bots navigate their world through extreme trial and error, carefully keeping track of what works and what doesn’t as they reach for a reward, like arriving at a landmark. If a particular action helps them achieve that reward, they know to keep doing it. In this same way, they learn to build their own language. Telling each other where to go helps them all get places more quickly....
“I was chatting with this robot BradTron yesterday, and it told me the funniest joke…” There’s a turn of phrase you’re probably not used to hearing. The robot part isn’t surprising– Roombas have been keeping our home’s tidy since 2002– but a robot being funny? With advancements in artificial intelligence, chatbots, and other AI taking heed in the business world, this turn of phrase may soon become a staple among online consumers. Last year, I talked about chatbots and their innovate yet slow-moving progress in the “intelligence” department, turning up frustration more often than not when used for customer service and marketing. 2017, however, is a different story: Gartner has predicted chatbots to be one of the biggest players in AI in 2017, along with tons of other artificial intelligence use cases for marketing that are sure to pick up steam throughout the year. Here’s what to expect from AI for business in 2017, and how your small business can get in on the action.
Chatbots — AI-enabled messaging programs that respond to text-based requests — are the latest innovation that startups and corporations are using to serve existing customers and bring in new ones. Companies across a wide variety of industries are building these tools on popular messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Slack, Kik, and Hipchat, as well as on their own websites and apps. Some are even available by text, to help users do things like fight parking tickets, respond to customer service inquiries, and order tacos.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, so if you see we’re missing a chatbot that’s currently up and running, please share the link with us in the comments section. We’ll add new, significant chatbots to the list over time.
Robots, though more specifically virtual robots or chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI), are transforming the way brands do business with their customers. Domino’s was one of the first companies to dabble in AI, allowing customers to order pizza by tweeting a pizza emoji to @Dominos. On the backend, a bot scans to confirm the tweet was not a hoax and processes the order.
More recently, Taco Bell unveiled its TacoBot within the Slack messaging platform that allows busy workers to chat with a bot to order a taco. And at Facebook’s F8, 1-800-Flowers, CNN, Spring — a retail shopping startup — and others released chatbots for Facebook Messenger. These bots offer new ways to shop, make purchases, read the news and more within the Facebook platform.
While all this sounds exciting, what does it actually mean for consumers, and what’s to become of the “humans” on social media?...
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Learn how to build and promote your own chatbot with this basic framework from HubSpot.