After the Tay bot fiasco last week, Microsoft appears to be relentless as the company is planning to keep trying until they get it right. According to reports, Microsoft is on the verge of showcasing not one, but several prototype bots at the annual Build conference that will take place later today. These bots are said to be the product of Microsoft’s belief and attempt to regard conversation as a platform and create AI assistants that can interact with users through natural language and even help them with various tasks.
It would seem that the Tay Bot experience did not put off the company whatsoever. For anyone unaware of the entire story, Microsoft’s Tay was a bot that was designed to speak like a teenage girl via Twitter as an experiment for researchers to understand artificial intelligence. Having access to a unique Twitter account, Tay could tweet to people or reply to other tweets and each separate experience would allow her to learn more and more from the messages she could see.
The experiment, however, did not return the expected results when Tay was pretty much exposed to the anonymous trolls the internet hosts, with no other source of information. As a result, Tay came to be a sexist personality that thinks Donald Trump is the best thing since French toast. As a result, Microsoft shut the bot up; but they did not delete the account, instead only protecting Tay’s tweets so they cannot be seen by anyone. She even made another cameo on Twitter this morning, before it fell into what everyone calls a meltdown and spamming everyone with the same message: “You are too fast, please take a rest…”
Nevertheless, Microsoft is far from admitting defeat in the battle of AI computers and robots. And they’re not the only ones who are placing a huge load of effort into creating bots that can both learn from its experiences as well as be able to talk fluently, much like a person. Apple has Siri, Amazon has Alexa, and Facebook will soon have the assistant currently only dubbed as ‘M’ that currently only mysteriously resides in the Messenger app.
It is not clear what the nature of the incoming bots is, but it’s suspected that they will be different from one another. There is a rumor travelling around that suggests that one of them intends to be a Domino’s delivery bot which will be showcased during an on-stage demo.
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