chatbots
Twitter makes humans look like bots
The advances in artificial intelligence and the rise of businesses that develop and employ chat-based bots mean that it gets increasingly hard to know whether you are dealing with a machine or a human being. The technology behind bots has gotten so sophisticated that it can require a longer conversation in order to be sure that there is no person of flesh and blood on the other end, as illustrated in this exchange with a Google support “employee” which I linked to in yesterday’s reading list. Basically, one has to run somewhat of a freestyle Turing Test. In other cases, the opposite happens: Users assume they are interacting with a machine, but in fact are having a chat with a real-human who only pretends to be a bot. An “Anti-Turing-Test”, as conducted in this example with Facebook’s experimental personal assistant M, can reveal this.
Bots pretending to be humans, humans pretending to be bots – sounds a bit bizarre, doesn’t it? Here is something else bizarre:
Think about what’s typical for a contemporary chatbot, those being used by large companies for customer service such as in the example above by Google, or by telecom operators (I recently had a chat interaction with T-Mobile which made me suspicious that I was conversing with a machine pretending to be a human): Continue Reading
AI-powered chatbots and the future of language learning
Chatbots are one of the next big things. Facebook’s experimental feature M, Slack’s Slackbot or bot-add ons for existing messengers like Whatsapp and Telegram such as Murdoch or WhatsBot show where we are heading: Into a world of conversational interfaces based on texting. Despite all fancy interaction tech available, texting has evolved as the world population’s most favourite way of interaction. Over the next years, more people will start to have text conversations with machines, so called bots. Conversations that thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning could feel pretty much like those with people from our “human” contact list. Even though sometimes still, what is presented to be a bot actually could be a human.
One area in which I hope that text-based conversational interfaces will flourish is language learning. The other day, I myself acted as a language learning bot, and the results were promising. Continue Reading