Chatbots world

The cutest robot video out there.

“Beginning as early as next year, many people are expected to have more conversations with digital voice assistants than with their spouse.Presently, the vast majority of these assistants—from Amazon’s Alexa to Microsoft’s Cortana—are projected as female, in name, sound of voice and ‘personality’.“

“Those interested in AI tend to fall into three camps: those who are suspicious and fearful of it (Will AI replace humans?), those who directly develop the technology (How can we improve AI?) and those who are optimistic about its potential even if they don’t know what that looks like (How and when should I deploy AI, and what for?).”

Tablet sales are in gradual decline as smart speakers continue to rocket ahead, according to analyst predictions. Source: ZDnet

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“Those patterns aren’t exactly surprising. They are the natural consequence of trends in US employment, where ethnic minorities are more often found in lower-skilled jobs, and men are over-represented in manufacturing and construction jobs. Many young workers enter the workforce in routine jobs such as food service, which are being roiled by innovations in robotic food processing and app or kiosk-style ordering like that embraced by McDonald's.”

Wired

ClickZ

The company said it was "excited to bring Alexa to Brazil" and that it will be asking some of its customers "to help refine her capabilities over the coming months."

As well as case studies on real world problems:

“While a Star Trek-like future of interacting verbally with pervasive computers is not yet here, many strides toward that have emerged in recent years. Intelligent assistants, such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant, are becoming increasingly common.Much of the implicit value proposition for using intelligent, conversational assistants is the use of natural language.  But language is an essentially social interface — it evolved to help us communicate with other people. How do the social aspects of language shape our interactions with language-based user interfaces? This is one of the questions that emerged in our research of conversational assistants.”

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Why our current definition of leadership doesn’t match the rallying cry for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

A group of linguists, technologists and sound designers have teamed up to create Q, the first genderless voice assistant designed to eradicate gender bias in technology.