A few days back Microsoft introduced a new artificial intelligence chatbot named Tay. The bot was hooked up to Twitter so that you and I could reach out to it and be amazed at how the conversational abilities of AI have been advanced. In less than 24 hours it ended up being less of a technological marvel and more of a racist bigot so Microsoft pulled the plug on Tay, but that’s reportedly not the end of its AI plans.
Bloomberg Business reports that Microsoft is going to unveil several new AI bots at its Build conference later today, adding that the bots are going to move Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s vision of conversation as a platform,” forward.
The idea behind this is to enable users to interact with bots using natural language and then command them to get certain tasks done. Hopefully, it will prove to be more useful than just using the bot to broadcast racist and bigoted views.
The report claims that Microsoft will unveil different bots and all of them will have different functions. Some will help the visually impaired by reading text from images and describing facial expressions while others will be baked into Skype so that users can easily book holidays and schedule deliveries.
Apparently Microsoft is also going to release bot templates which will help developers to create some of their own. The company hasn’t commented on this report yet but seeing as how the Build conference is merely a few hours away, we’ll found out soon enough.
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