You're Thinking About Chatbots All Wrong
by Michael Szul on
Almost two years, I brought up the lack of a killer application when it came to chatbots. That killer app still doesn't exist.
Almost two years, I brought up the lack of a killer application when it came to chatbots. That killer app still doesn't exist.
I have a confession... I don't actually hate Facebook. And I no longer blame Facebook for any of the societal or political upheaval surrounding it. If you follow me on Twitter, you'll likely read me...
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Back in May, my institution went through a little bit of a reorganization. The end result included a team dedicated to medical education software, and my job was to begin reviewing our team's overall process and workflow to find pockets of improvement, and to begin a minor transformation from an applications and custom software team, to one more focused on the business value of our medical education mission.
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With this milestone release, you can now create Twitter bots with the Microsoft Bot Framework. Let's go over some of the sample code from the repository.
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The neat thing about Watson's NLU is that it doesn't just track sentiment, but actually attempts to detect and analyze emotions as well. If asked, it'll return an emotion score object containing five emotions and their various scores.
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Behavior can be unpredictable. Are we really sure we want to pattern robots and chatbots after that? The greatest example in recent memory is Microsoft's Tay, which was revisited and profiled in a story on ZDNet in July.
A few weeks ago, we made the official release. You can now use IBM Watson as the text analysis engine in your Bot Framework chatbots.
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One of the major reasons Bill and I started Codepunk was for the distillation of information. If I learn something that I think others could benefit from, I'll drop it here.
Facebook's announcement of Libra should come with zero shock attached. The social media company's entire business model revolves around keeping people within their walled garden, invading all aspects of their attention and lives.
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Anyone who has been following me on this web site is well aware that I've been diligently working on a Bot Framework book for close to two years now.
Way back in March of 2017, we did a podcast episode on the Microsoft Bot Framework. Shortly thereafter, I (Michael) started working on a book about how to build chatbots with the Bot Framework Node.JS SDK.
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If you know me, have read any of my posts, or heard me speak at a conference over the last two years, you're probably aware of my immersion in chatbots.
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I gave a talk on chatbots at a recent JavaScript conference in Richmond, Virginia. The crowd was lighter than some of the other talks, and I've actually noticed a downward trend in attendance on sessions about chatbots.
Chatbots don't just send information, but they receive information as well. Bots are normally seen accepting information in a very choose-your-own-adventure way, as well as through LUIS--an implementation of natural language processing. This was as textual input, however, which is great for conversations, but chatbots are not just conversations, they are conversational applications.
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The adapter object represents the Bot Framework adapter that manages your chatbot, and you can attach middleware to the adapter in order to enhance your...
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For those of you that have been reading this blog for a while now, clearly you know that chatbots have been my thing. I got involved early, and as a Microsoft MVP, I've been privy to newer things coming down the pipeline thanks to interactions with the product group.
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Microsoft and Facebook started championing bots because they saw how much people were using communication applications on phones.
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ChartaCloud is the robotics company behind NAO and Pepper. You might not know the company, but you've seen the robots. Their photos are used in almost every article about robot assistants--even when they aren't the actual robots or chatbots being talked about in the article.
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What better article to feature in a bots and beer newsletter than one that actually has to do with artificial intelligence (okay, text mining) and craft beer? We decided to give this article a little love, and let it be the only article featured.