Search Results for: "artificial intelligence"

On the Female Gendering of Bots ⇥ aworkinglibrary.com

Mandy Brown:

Notably, Amazon’s Alexa, x.ai’s Amy, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana have something else in common: they are all explicitly gendered as female. […] The neutral politeness that infects them all furthers that convention: women should be utilitarian, performing their duties on command without fuss or flourish. This is a vile, harmful, and dreadfully boring fantasy; not the least because there is so much extraordinary art around AI that both deconstructs and subverts these stereotypes. It takes a massive failure of imagination to commit yourself to building an artificial intelligence and then name it ‘Amy.’

Google’s Assistant, announced today at I/O, is does not have a gendered name, but the voiceover is still decidedly female.

Facebook’s Messenger Bots Are Frustrating ⇥ gizmodo.com

Debuting last week at Facebook’s F8 conference, the initial batch of Messenger bots have not been well-received. Spencer Chen struggled to order flowers because the bot didn’t understand cancellation commands, while Mat Honan was provided a weather forecast for an entirely different city.

Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopoulos tried to purchase shoes, and came upon a realization:

Some people hate to shop. They want to look nice, but hate having to pick out their own clothes and would be grateful to be shown just three options from a trusted store. […]

However, this is NOT the customer who is buying $400 women’s shoes. The $400 women’s shoes customer most likely enjoys shopping. The same for $400 men’s shoes! The kind of shopper who is going to buy the fairly expensive kind of apparel that Spring offers is not the same customer who wants to use a bot that will show them three options.

And Darren Orf over at Gizmodo summed up the platform’s status:

But most people will likely try out these rough-cut bots and decide they’re not worth the hassle. Chatbots leave you with that same itch in the back of your mind that it’s easier to get the weather or send flowers the old-fashioned way. They’ll get better, but it’s going to take time. Right now, chatbots are a robotic wild west, and for the foreseeable future, you’re better off sticking with civilized society.

These issues are familiar to anyone who used Siri after it first launched in 2011 or, indeed, anyone who has used virtually any natural language processing software. Beyond speech recognition problems, it’s clear that virtual assistants and bots like these continue to struggle with grasping human intent. They’re only programmed to pick up on key words and phrases, and to try to follow the progression of the conversation. But the moment that something is interjected — like when Chen asked the flower delivery bot whether it was available in Canada — it doesn’t follow the flowchart, and the conversation breaks down.

If Apple is on track to debut the Siri API at WWDC, it would be helpful to third-party developers if it would assist with the interpretation and contextualization of the conversation instead of requiring developers to build their own artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The Layer Between You and the Future ⇥ buzzfeed.com

Crack reporting from Buzzfeed’s Nitasha Tiku:

Augmented reality, virtual reality, live video, 360-degree video, artificial intelligence, business bots. You name it; Facebook is about to offer you a free way to start testing it, whether that’s APIs, the kind of connective software that lets 1-800-FLOWERS make its own app on Facebook Messenger, or hardware that turned the melting heap of cameras necessary to film 360-degree video into a sleek mini-spaceship of a camera that Facebook launched at the end of today’s keynote.

Facebook doesn’t have to choose between messaging or virtual reality. It just colonizes both platforms, figures it out, offers a helping hand to the advertisers, publishers, and e-tailers considering joining, and makes itself indispensable (for a cut).

The last time I can recall a company having anything like Facebook’s drive for dominance was the Microsoft of the ’90s and early ’00s. At the time, they abused their monopoly power in software, from operating systems to applications and web browsers. Facebook is stretching itself overtop a multitude of technologies; it wants to be the start-to-finish conduit for your life. The future will be brought to you by targeted advertising.

Alan Turing at 100 ⇥ washingtonpost.com

David Leavitt reflects on Alan Turing in a comment piece for the Washington Post:

For Alan Turing’s many admirers, the centenary of his birth on Saturday is an occasion for both celebration and mourning. Here, after all, is the architect of the modern computer, the code-breaker whose ingenuity ensured an Allied victory in World War II and the father of artificial intelligence. Yet Turing was also a victim of a pernicious and paranoid strain of sexual hypocrisy in 20th-century England. Nor, in the 21st, has the victimization wholly ceased.

Today, we remember Turing for what would have been his hundredth birthday. We remember him for his substantial contributions in technology, but we must not forget the circumstances of his last years and death.