7 ms·

why is this space so active? and why now? there are a massive amount of bot & chatbot conpanies and it is a fairly recent trend. Are we on the cusp of beating

why is this space so active? and why now? there are a massive amount of bot & chatbot conpanies and it is a fairly recent trend. Are we on the cusp of beating the turing test? the space is exploding

toomuchtodo 11y ago
Its hard to know if something is truly an innovation or simply a hype train until after the fact.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  IBM is already selling an automated bot that can rplace a level I support questionaire by chat or voice and saw something similar in use (but not the IBM idk how well that works) so at least you get a real, compelling case for it and it is not just up in the air
  - tonylucas 11y ago
    This is the area we (www.converse.ai) are focussed on, as it's solving a real pain point. Semi or fully automating realtime customer service is definitely a real use case :)
  - douche 11y ago
    Hmm, wonder why they aren't using it internally. IBM moves a lot of their internal helpdesk support through IM, but far as I know, there's real people on the other end of it, for all but the simplest cases.
    - LoSboccacc 11y ago
      from my experience every help desk question require a team just to find that one person which has the knowledge to answer, it'd be a haunting task to find all the bits around any products and place them in an actionable knowledge base XD
  - 2sk21 11y ago
    As it happens, I work on the Watson dialog service which is being used to make this and similar kinds of bots. IT support is just one of the use cases that we are working on.
miguelrochefort 11y ago
The rise of AI lead people to think that conversation/speech is the future of UI. Hence the bots. The hype will die in a few years, as people will realize that natural language is a terrible interface.
- wyldfire 11y ago
  It might, but if so I'd expect it to come back with a vengeance in a few decades. For as bad as it is, it has a lot of appeal.
- taneq 11y ago
  Or if not, it'll explain why in sci-fi movies, robots talk to each other in English.
  - Intermernet 11y ago
    "What I really need is a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators." "Vaporators? Sir, my first job was programming binary loadlifters—very similar to your vaporators in most respects."
    - taneq 11y ago
      Trope averted! Although he still talks to R2 in English despite being fluent in over three billion languages.
- CMay 11y ago
  It's not a terrible interface, it's just one of many interfaces that has great usage scenarios. You aren't going to draw a sketch with a gamepad controller. You aren't going to play Street Fighter with a stylus. Touchscreens provide a terrible experience for a large number of scenarios. Virtual reality headsets won't be desirable for everything. Being able to just talk is one of the least physically demanding forms of input that can possibly be used and if the language can be understood accurately enough with a wide variety of computer solutions backing the responses, people will become comfortable with asking for those types of responses. I didn't see anyone say it would be the only interface in the future, just that it would be one of many. Microsoft is saying you can write one application solution and expose a variety of interfaces. Use the keyboard and mouse when you're sitting at the desk with Outlook, or ask Cortana to do that for you if you're across the room or busy driving across town. Whatever is convenient.
Pharaoh2 11y ago
We have already beaten the turing test multiple times, each time making the test more complicated than how it was originally designed. We have now moved on to the supposedly better chinese room test.
- FooBarWidget 11y ago
  The turing test, if performed over the Internet, is absurdly easy to solve. Just write a bot that replies in a rude way, with bad grammar and spelling and use lots of Internet slang. The tester will conclude that it's a human idiot. Example: Tester> can you elaborate on the meaning of life? Bot> wtf? u suck lolololol!!! Tester> uhm... Bot> r u dumb?
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Well, that’s not what Turing meant. What Turing meant was being able to ask the bot things, like "what do you think of Angela Merkel’s stance in the refugee debate?" or ask the bot about economics, or philosophy – and the bot would answer. Conversing with the bot, and doing it in a way where you receive answers that are meaningful, is a required part for intelligence. The people you mentioned – if judged just by their online interactions – would not count as intelligent life.
- Retra 11y ago
  We're not even remotely close to passing a Turing test.
amasad 11y ago
My armchair theory as to why this is happening: it's driven mostly by developer needs. Although there are some interesting applications for chat interfaces, I think that the excitement is mostly hype. Developers jumped on this bandwagon because: - mobile app delivery sucks (Apple and Google are not trying to make it better, Facebook and Microsoft are but there is only so much you can do when you don't own the platform) - the web is still subpar for mobile and is not progressing fast enough - developers (understandably) want to get back the practices that became popular in the Web 2.0 era: continuous delivery, a/b testing, etc - running code on your own servers is much easier to develop, test, debug, and change - UIs are still hard to build. Things are slowly getting better but it's very expensive to hire good Frontend engineers and designers and you need to laboriously create UIs for every possible interaction - apps are too much of a commitment for users. Whether you are looking for something or just want to use something once you have to install an app and sign up for it just to try it. This app will then live on your home screen along with hundreds of other apps that you don't really use. The recent advances in NLP and some AI techniques made it possible to create good chat interfaces. Which is a much better developer experience. It's still unclear whether it's the best possible user experience.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  It's actually really funny, because before I saw a lot of this hitting the news, I was working on my own home automation system, and trying to figure out a quick temporary solution to reach it from the outside world, without developing client apps. And I thought of email. A well standardized message queuing platform that could easily implement a basic text command interface. So I ended up with a rudimentary chat bot. (I could've done SMS, but didn't want to find and pay for a service for that.) And a few weeks before this announcement, I'd been thinking about how to handle queries to my chat bot my software didn't understand, and I was thinking "Hey, I wonder if I could have my bot ask Cortana stuff if it doesn't know". And Microsoft's picked up and really ran with this model with Bot Framework. Obviously they've been working on this behind the scenes for a while, I'm not trying to take credit for the concept by any stretch, but I thought it was funny that I had been thinking along those lines myself before I heard about this. Good UI isn't hard. Generally, it's simple and universally understood. I instantly understood where Microsoft was going here because I had the same thoughts. That being said, I want my system running mostly locally/self-hosted, so an Azure-based platform like Bot Framework probably won't work for my own system, though I might very well send requests to other bots using it.
putaside 11y ago
Marketing, buy-in, monetizing Skype, and product placement: The field of AI is ridiculously hot. A Chatbot is the least complex AI to build, but it still qualifies as AI. Hence, if you want to join the hype, a chatbot is a reasonable start. With a few regular expressions and if-then rules you too can build Tay.ai (but only MS can get the press for it). Compare to Microsoft PopFly and Silverlight with rich media. [1] It's also possible that Google releases personal assistants for Google Business in the next few months, and MS picked up on that 6 months ago. Competition: Facebook is building "M", a personal assistant-style personal assistant. Apple has Siri. Google has Google Now. And MS has Cortana. Technology: Some (Weasel-word, but I don't want to list names) say that computer vision is now solved. Convnets can predict 1000-class problems with the same accuracy as humans. The deep learning field is now eating away at the fields of reinforcement learning, generative art, and NLP. Recent papers show that it is now possible to create a conversational bot without any hand-crafting of rules. Military/defense: Both the AI/ML industry and academics are in bed with the military complex. We did not study convnets, to aid the blind, no, we studied convnets, so we could detect terrorists at the border or in public transit. The people working on guided missile systems in the previous generation are now working on unmanned aerial drones. People were interested in fooling convnets, not for the hell of it, but because it is dangerous when a turret mistakes a tank for a puppy. For NLP: DARPA and IARPA want better defense and intelligence technology. The systems to suck up all these global communications are in place, but it still relies on old "dumb" tech, like keyword-matching. It is not able to detect sarcasm, 1337-speak, or code words. That is a big driver behind the attempt to evolve NLP: Terrorists do not need encryption, when they can talk about butchering goats and get lost in the noise, and no one is the wiser. The Turing-test will forever be a moving goal-post. Mimicking intelligence does not seem to be enough to call machines intelligent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Popfly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Popfly
gukov 11y ago
It all comes down to people spending more time in messenger apps than anywhere else.
jedberg 11y ago
I wrote a blog post about this, but in summary, the most natural way for humans to communicate is through real time chat and people spend a lot of time in chat these days. https://cloudnative.io/blog/2016/03/chatbots-will-replace-humans-not-programs/ https://cloudnative.io/blog/2016/03/chatbots-will-replace-hu...
skywhopper 11y ago
The answer is Slack. Slack is booming and garnering a ton of investment. Slack has a good bot interface and a zillion integrations, which only adds to the value. As for why Microsoft is jumping in now? They have a Slack clone in the works. This bot framework is just laying the groundwork for duplicating one of the core reasons for Slack's success. As for the Turing test, no, none of these bots come close. The frameworks make it easy to match simple text commands, but that's about it.
vincent_s 11y ago
Chatbots are the new apps. Chatbots are a way to integrate other services into WhatsApp/FB, Slack, etc. China's WeChat is setting the trend here [1]. You can do things like payments, online shopping, order a pizza/taxi/whatever with just a simple text message. WhatsApp will be offering a paid API soon that will make Chatbots available within WhatsApp and thus make all the above possible. As a result, messengers like WhatsApp will become a platform. Instead of having to install an app for every service you just add a contact to your messenger and text him what you want. [1] https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-social-commerce-chinaccelerator https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-social-commerce-chinaccele...
- MzHN 11y ago
  >WhatsApp will be offering a paid API soon that will make Chatbots available within WhatsApp and thus make all the above possible. Is that a wild guess, or sourced somewhere? Anyway, with Microsoft releasing this, and supported apps such as Telegram already having a bot API, this does put a lot of pressure on WhatsApp.
basch 11y ago
because the command line is one of the best ways to interface with a computer, and chat bots are fuzzy commandlines.

why is this space so active? and why now? there are a massive amount of bot & chatbot conpanies and it is a fairly recent trend. Are we on the cusp of beating the turing test? the space is exploding

toomuchtodo 11y ago

Its hard to know if something is truly an innovation or simply a hype train until after the fact.

LoSboccacc 11y ago
IBM is already selling an automated bot that can rplace a level I support questionaire by chat or voice and saw something similar in use (but not the IBM idk how well that works) so at least you get a real, compelling case for it and it is not just up in the air
- tonylucas 11y ago
  This is the area we (www.converse.ai) are focussed on, as it's solving a real pain point. Semi or fully automating realtime customer service is definitely a real use case :)
- douche 11y ago
  Hmm, wonder why they aren't using it internally. IBM moves a lot of their internal helpdesk support through IM, but far as I know, there's real people on the other end of it, for all but the simplest cases.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    from my experience every help desk question require a team just to find that one person which has the knowledge to answer, it'd be a haunting task to find all the bits around any products and place them in an actionable knowledge base XD
- 2sk21 11y ago
  As it happens, I work on the Watson dialog service which is being used to make this and similar kinds of bots. IT support is just one of the use cases that we are working on.

miguelrochefort 11y ago

The rise of AI lead people to think that conversation/speech is the future of UI. Hence the bots. The hype will die in a few years, as people will realize that natural language is a terrible interface.

wyldfire 11y ago
It might, but if so I'd expect it to come back with a vengeance in a few decades. For as bad as it is, it has a lot of appeal.
taneq 11y ago
Or if not, it'll explain why in sci-fi movies, robots talk to each other in English.
- Intermernet 11y ago
  "What I really need is a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators." "Vaporators? Sir, my first job was programming binary loadlifters—very similar to your vaporators in most respects."
  - taneq 11y ago
    Trope averted! Although he still talks to R2 in English despite being fluent in over three billion languages.
CMay 11y ago
It's not a terrible interface, it's just one of many interfaces that has great usage scenarios. You aren't going to draw a sketch with a gamepad controller. You aren't going to play Street Fighter with a stylus. Touchscreens provide a terrible experience for a large number of scenarios. Virtual reality headsets won't be desirable for everything. Being able to just talk is one of the least physically demanding forms of input that can possibly be used and if the language can be understood accurately enough with a wide variety of computer solutions backing the responses, people will become comfortable with asking for those types of responses. I didn't see anyone say it would be the only interface in the future, just that it would be one of many. Microsoft is saying you can write one application solution and expose a variety of interfaces. Use the keyboard and mouse when you're sitting at the desk with Outlook, or ask Cortana to do that for you if you're across the room or busy driving across town. Whatever is convenient.

Pharaoh2 11y ago

We have already beaten the turing test multiple times, each time making the test more complicated than how it was originally designed. We have now moved on to the supposedly better chinese room test.

FooBarWidget 11y ago
The turing test, if performed over the Internet, is absurdly easy to solve. Just write a bot that replies in a rude way, with bad grammar and spelling and use lots of Internet slang. The tester will conclude that it's a human idiot. Example: Tester> can you elaborate on the meaning of life? Bot> wtf? u suck lolololol!!! Tester> uhm... Bot> r u dumb?
- kuschku 11y ago
  Well, that’s not what Turing meant. What Turing meant was being able to ask the bot things, like "what do you think of Angela Merkel’s stance in the refugee debate?" or ask the bot about economics, or philosophy – and the bot would answer. Conversing with the bot, and doing it in a way where you receive answers that are meaningful, is a required part for intelligence. The people you mentioned – if judged just by their online interactions – would not count as intelligent life.
Retra 11y ago
We're not even remotely close to passing a Turing test.

amasad 11y ago

My armchair theory as to why this is happening: it's driven mostly by developer needs. Although there are some interesting applications for chat interfaces, I think that the excitement is mostly hype. Developers jumped on this bandwagon because: - mobile app delivery sucks (Apple and Google are not trying to make it better, Facebook and Microsoft are but there is only so much you can do when you don't own the platform) - the web is still subpar for mobile and is not progressing fast enough - developers (understandably) want to get back the practices that became popular in the Web 2.0 era: continuous delivery, a/b testing, etc - running code on your own servers is much easier to develop, test, debug, and change - UIs are still hard to build. Things are slowly getting better but it's very expensive to hire good Frontend engineers and designers and you need to laboriously create UIs for every possible interaction - apps are too much of a commitment for users. Whether you are looking for something or just want to use something once you have to install an app and sign up for it just to try it. This app will then live on your home screen along with hundreds of other apps that you don't really use. The recent advances in NLP and some AI techniques made it possible to create good chat interfaces. Which is a much better developer experience. It's still unclear whether it's the best possible user experience.

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
It's actually really funny, because before I saw a lot of this hitting the news, I was working on my own home automation system, and trying to figure out a quick temporary solution to reach it from the outside world, without developing client apps. And I thought of email. A well standardized message queuing platform that could easily implement a basic text command interface. So I ended up with a rudimentary chat bot. (I could've done SMS, but didn't want to find and pay for a service for that.) And a few weeks before this announcement, I'd been thinking about how to handle queries to my chat bot my software didn't understand, and I was thinking "Hey, I wonder if I could have my bot ask Cortana stuff if it doesn't know". And Microsoft's picked up and really ran with this model with Bot Framework. Obviously they've been working on this behind the scenes for a while, I'm not trying to take credit for the concept by any stretch, but I thought it was funny that I had been thinking along those lines myself before I heard about this. Good UI isn't hard. Generally, it's simple and universally understood. I instantly understood where Microsoft was going here because I had the same thoughts. That being said, I want my system running mostly locally/self-hosted, so an Azure-based platform like Bot Framework probably won't work for my own system, though I might very well send requests to other bots using it.

putaside 11y ago

Marketing, buy-in, monetizing Skype, and product placement: The field of AI is ridiculously hot. A Chatbot is the least complex AI to build, but it still qualifies as AI. Hence, if you want to join the hype, a chatbot is a reasonable start. With a few regular expressions and if-then rules you too can build Tay.ai (but only MS can get the press for it). Compare to Microsoft PopFly and Silverlight with rich media. [1] It's also possible that Google releases personal assistants for Google Business in the next few months, and MS picked up on that 6 months ago. Competition: Facebook is building "M", a personal assistant-style personal assistant. Apple has Siri. Google has Google Now. And MS has Cortana. Technology: Some (Weasel-word, but I don't want to list names) say that computer vision is now solved. Convnets can predict 1000-class problems with the same accuracy as humans. The deep learning field is now eating away at the fields of reinforcement learning, generative art, and NLP. Recent papers show that it is now possible to create a conversational bot without any hand-crafting of rules. Military/defense: Both the AI/ML industry and academics are in bed with the military complex. We did not study convnets, to aid the blind, no, we studied convnets, so we could detect terrorists at the border or in public transit. The people working on guided missile systems in the previous generation are now working on unmanned aerial drones. People were interested in fooling convnets, not for the hell of it, but because it is dangerous when a turret mistakes a tank for a puppy. For NLP: DARPA and IARPA want better defense and intelligence technology. The systems to suck up all these global communications are in place, but it still relies on old "dumb" tech, like keyword-matching. It is not able to detect sarcasm, 1337-speak, or code words. That is a big driver behind the attempt to evolve NLP: Terrorists do not need encryption, when they can talk about butchering goats and get lost in the noise, and no one is the wiser. The Turing-test will forever be a moving goal-post. Mimicking intelligence does not seem to be enough to call machines intelligent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Popfly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Popfly

gukov 11y ago

It all comes down to people spending more time in messenger apps than anywhere else.

jedberg 11y ago

I wrote a blog post about this, but in summary, the most natural way for humans to communicate is through real time chat and people spend a lot of time in chat these days. https://cloudnative.io/blog/2016/03/chatbots-will-replace-humans-not-programs/ https://cloudnative.io/blog/2016/03/chatbots-will-replace-hu...

skywhopper 11y ago

The answer is Slack. Slack is booming and garnering a ton of investment. Slack has a good bot interface and a zillion integrations, which only adds to the value. As for why Microsoft is jumping in now? They have a Slack clone in the works. This bot framework is just laying the groundwork for duplicating one of the core reasons for Slack's success. As for the Turing test, no, none of these bots come close. The frameworks make it easy to match simple text commands, but that's about it.

vincent_s 11y ago

Chatbots are the new apps. Chatbots are a way to integrate other services into WhatsApp/FB, Slack, etc. China's WeChat is setting the trend here [1]. You can do things like payments, online shopping, order a pizza/taxi/whatever with just a simple text message. WhatsApp will be offering a paid API soon that will make Chatbots available within WhatsApp and thus make all the above possible. As a result, messengers like WhatsApp will become a platform. Instead of having to install an app for every service you just add a contact to your messenger and text him what you want. [1] https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-social-commerce-chinaccelerator https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-social-commerce-chinaccele...

MzHN 11y ago
>WhatsApp will be offering a paid API soon that will make Chatbots available within WhatsApp and thus make all the above possible. Is that a wild guess, or sourced somewhere? Anyway, with Microsoft releasing this, and supported apps such as Telegram already having a bot API, this does put a lot of pressure on WhatsApp.

basch 11y ago

because the command line is one of the best ways to interface with a computer, and chat bots are fuzzy commandlines.