Overview: Digital Transformation

Facebook introduced new APIs for messaging through Facebook Messenger. ... bots are legitimately cool and promise to revolutionize how we interact with services. And it’s a piece of cake to get one up and running.

I haven’t yet met a single bot that actually does ANYTHING better than a great UX... that actually does ANYTHING beyond a narrow scripted interaction. They all seem OK inside a script (in English), but become super-annoying very fast, when moving out of their pre-designed limits. So I decided to deploy a chatbot, without building one, just to see …

When a Vox Media Slack user sends a direct message to simbot specifying a seed article URL and a number of desired results, then the bot would return a ranked list of articles that are most similar in content to the article found in the provided URL. two main applications for the bot ... enable editors ... on social media... to discover related…

You can now chat with all sorts of bots through a number of messaging services... The trouble is that computers still have a hard time understanding human language... but chatbots are still prone to confusion and misunderstanding... The best commercial chatbots will most likely be those that recognize their own limitations... There have been no …

Picture a nightmarish future in which half-witted “conversational user interfaces” drive us insane with mindless conversation and misunderstandings...chatbots may be incredibly annoying. And things may be even more annoying if app designers fail to appreciate the significant challenges that remain with using computers to parse and respond to natur…

bandwagons are bad for your health, as illustrated by the impending death of content marketing and the gathering backlash against Slack (Slacklash? BackSlacksh?) and (already!?) chatbots.

this addiction has been killing my sanity and sapping our productivity as we simply used Slack for too many things... we would add more channels in a desperate attempt to allow people to find the important information they needed while avoiding the noise... All of these interactions would happen in Slack, despite there being many other tools tha…

What are chatbots? Why are they such a big opportunity? How do they work? How can I build one? How can I meet other people interested in chatbots?

recent “bot-mania” is at the confluence of two separate trends... agent AIs steadily getting better... the US somehow still hasn’t got a dominant messaging app and Silicon Valley is trying to learn from the success of Asian messenger apps... The thesis, then, is that users will engage more frequently, deeply, and efficiently with third-party s…

your market of digital narcissists is only going to become more elusive... Micro-moments happen when a customer demonstrates intent by reaching for his or her phone to act on a need in real time. They unfold through a variety of common "I want" scenarios that help people take steps or make decisions as to what to buy, do, know, etc... The third w…

it only takes few weeks before you receive a full diagnostic report providing you with new levers to accelerate the development of your organization. Your employees invest less than 10 minutes completing a user-friendly questionnaire that they can do from their work or home computer, tablet or smartphone – we will do the rest.

at #EuroComm16... “Beyond Engagement.”... how uncoupling the IC function from a focus on Employee Engagement survey scores could have a liberating effect on the function and the profession, and potentially on employees and their enterprises as well... We weren’t here to praise the Employee Engagement Survey. We were here to bury it... In giving …

What happened when I was invited to “do a Rápido” at the IABC’s conference in Rotterdam earlier this week.

Work management is a term that has emerged in recent years as task management tools were enhanced with various social communication capabilities... The primary distinction here is the degree of emphasis for task-centric versus message-centric tools.

TL;DR: because you think it’s a solution in itself, while it’s merely a framework for organizations to create them in an efficient and controlled manner.

 There are hundreds of playful, creative, smart people building useful and insightful and silly bots online.These are ten of them that our data and my editorial judgement suggests you should know.  These are the bot influencers most-followed by the bot community itself.

Microsoft is trying to create all kinds of bots with different personalities, which would become more realistic, and presumably less irksome, as they learned from repeated interactions with users... They’ll act as your interface with computers and smartphones, helping you book a trip or send a message to a colleague, and do that through a conversa…

bots — or “chatbots” — are an increasingly trendy model for software.This new obsession came on fast. But why? Where did these bots come from? Who is building them? What for? Is a fake conversation better than just clicking buttons? You’ll be hearing a lot more about bots soon, so here’s an overview.... bots won’t kill apps anytime soon. It’s more…

But Go programs still fell far short of human players in ability. It seemed as though a strong intuitive sense of board position was essential to success.What’s new and important about AlphaGo is that its developers have figured out a way of bottling something very like that intuitive sense... .Just because neural networks can do a good job of cap…

The hard part is striking the right balance. The just-right spot where everyone knows enough, no one feels like they know too little, and no one feels like they’re being over-informed to the point of it being annoying or distracting. And doing it all at a variety of resolutions — big picture, medium-picture, and small picture — without overdoing i…

At first, Fan Hui thought the move was rather odd. But then he saw its beauty. “It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move,” he says. “So beautiful.”... AlphaGo ... has beaten the very best by playing in ways that no human would.... AlphaGo has taught him, a human, to be a better player. He sees things he didn’t see before. And …

these vehicles will also collect reams of personal information about their passengers... topic came up last week at a Congressional hearing on driverless cars, and the companies potentially doing the data-collecting were, and this is putting it gently, evasive.

could pose a devastating threat to large tranches of the financial industry, and profoundly change the management of monetary policy... RSCoin would be a tool of state control, allowing the central bank to keep a tight grip on the money supply and respond to crises. It would erode the exorbitant privilege of commercial banks of creating money out …

AI still can’t ... deal with natural language well enough, but it’s getting much better. And the way translation’s currently done will change because Google now has what promises to be a much better way to do machine translation.

the rise of Trump using language of how we talk about startups that become black swans.

The main Topics this time are language technology, mobile innovation and EU communications, with a few extras to catch-up since the last edition.

To understand what makes BuzzFeed tick, you need to know how Dao Nguyen thinks about data... As the value of content approaches zero, "Having technology, data science, and being able to know how to manage, optimize and coordinate your publishing is the thing that gives you a competitive advantage"... One myth is data scientists are telling report…

To get a better grip on the questions that bots raise... organized a workshop that brought together a diverse group of bot experts. This article is the output of the event, a tour of the bot and its semi-autonomy from three perspectives: that of the designer, the implementer, and the regulator... The last several years have seen a rise in bots …

BotOrNot checks the activity of a Twitter account and gives it a score based on how likely the account is to be a bot. Higher scores are more bot-like.

[leaders are] usually busy furiously making believe that there is no decline. Instead of leading societies out of decline (which is what they should be doing), they’re working night and day manufacturing (or luxuriously reclining in) what I’ll call Unreality Bubbles... intelligentsias manufacture unrealities in eras of decline because their positi…