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
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
- 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.
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.
I have to strongly disagree with that, it might be easy to spot good UI but it is not normally easy to make a good UI.
As for SMS Twilio is dirt cheap $0.0075/message + $1/mo for a number also combining it with something like Wit.ai [0] to parse your text and you can get pretty far.
I felt this was one of the few ways you could insure the game could still be played in perpetuity after a company had gone away and their servers shut down, without requiring people to host a dedicated server.
Obviously this wouldn't work with real time games, and players could potentially abuse the data being sent if you're not careful and/or don't encrypt the data, but I prefer making turn-based games anyway.
Having worked for several small companies that have shut down, that's a concern to me (although you can't even download most of those games anymore since they were taken off their respective app stores).
I found it interesting Microsoft Garage made an "IM client" that uses email in the backend recently. In some cases, I think all these new protocols we invented was reinventing the wheel, when we already had something that worked fine.
Using it for games is a really neat idea. In a plaintext format, you could even space out things like a Scrabble board, using @ and & symbols for special blanks or such, and one user could be lower case letters, and the other could use capital letters. Dots for normal blanks.
I love simple formats.
For example take a look at the RFC 5322 and try to determine what is or isn't a valid address. You have a lot of weird edge cases to take in account and it's not always obvious how you are supposed to handle them.
However, if you are building a piece of software that simply communicates over email, you only have to support a relatively straightforward format for email that everyone else inherently supports.
Depending on the platform you're building on, a lot of the basics of actual email sending and receiving may be handled by the platform directly as well. I didn't have to write the SMTP handling for my code, for example, because the platform I was building my app on pretty much did it for me.
Also, the great thing about figuring out weird edge cases with email, is that email is such a widely used and universal protocol, there are literally millions of places on the Internet that have code for it or talk about it. There's a lot of resources out there.
Since the game would need your email password in order to load incoming messages I would advise them to create a new email just for game communication purposes anyway, and tell them not to use certain characters if for some reason I couldn't get them to work (although the libraries should be able to handle it anyway).
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.
https://cloudnative.io/blog/2016/03/chatbots-will-replace-hu...
The hype will die in a few years, as people will realize that natural language is a terrible interface.
"Vaporators? Sir, my first job was programming binary loadlifters—very similar to your vaporators in most respects."
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.
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.
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-chinaccele...
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.
Semi or fully automating realtime customer service is definitely a real use case :)
Example:
Tester> can you elaborate on the meaning of life?
Bot> wtf? u suck lolololol!!!
Tester> uhm...
Bot> r u dumb?
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.