Source: Emily Barry
Chatbots Startups and the Future of Marketing and Selling
Venture Radar: Chatbots are programs that mimic conversation with people using artificial intelligence.
CB Insights: Advances in artificial intelligence algorithms have put chatbots and voice assistants in the spotlight, with investor interest in the space increasing in recent months.
From Artificial intelligence (AI) And The Future Of Marketing: 6 Observations From Inbound 2016
At Inbound 2016, HubSpot’s co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah entertained 19,000 attendees with their take on the past and future of marketing. Here’s what I learned from their keynote presentation and a brief interview.
2017 will be the year of the bot. So predicts Halligan, adding “in five years, you will do a lot less navigating through apps and more just asking questions and chatting back and forth with bots… the next thing you know, we like it and it’s easier and more efficient than waiting for the sales rep to call you back.” Shah notes that businesses started building websites in the 1990s so they can answer customer questions 24/7. “Soon,” he says, “they will start building bots. They won’t replace the websites, but they will power them. The shortest time between a customer question and the answer will be a bot. It’s not human vs. bot, it’s human to the bot powered.” (HubSpot’s recent contribution to the bot power movement: Growthbot).
The “marketing conversation” will become a human-machine conversation. That the essence of marketing is a “conversation” between a business (or any “brand”) and its customers and potential customers has been a marketing tenet (and cliché) for a long time. While that conversation has been conducted over the last twenty years increasingly through a computer screen with the help of a keyboard, it is now transforming into human-machine conversation. “The conversational UI,” says Shah, “is going to be an even bigger leap in software than we had with the shift to Web-based software. We are all re-thinking now how to build products.” It’s the most natural way to engage, interact, market and sell: “We will have voice input because it’s much more efficient [than typing] and visual output because it’s more efficient than listening—we can see and read and scan much faster that we can listen. I don’t think screens are going away but the keyboard is likely going to be less and less prevalent.”
The Next Big Thing in Robotics
Travis Deyle, Why Indoor Robots for Commercial Spaces Are the Next Big Thing in Robotics:
Venture funding for robotics has exploded by more than 10x over the last six years and shows no signs of stopping. Most of this investment has been focused on the usual suspects: logistics, warehouse automation, robot arms for manufacturing, healthcare and surgical robots, drones, agriculture, and autonomous cars…
There’s a massive, untapped market… Commercial spaces such as hotels, hospitals, offices, retail stores, banks, schools, nursing homes, schools, malls, and museums.
Data Is Eating the World: Self-Driving Cars
Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich explained why the company was so keen to move into the world of self-driving cars.
“Many of you have asked why we think autonomous cars and vehicles are so important to Intel’s future,” Krzanich said in an email message to Intel employees on Monday.
“The answer is DATA. Our strategy is to make Intel the driving force of the data revolution across every technology and every industry. We are a DATA company. The businesses we focus on, and deliver solutions to, create, use and analyze massive amounts of data,” he wrote.
Source: Times of Israel
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The Dark Web
The Web is like an iceberg divided into three segments, each with its own cluster of hangouts for cyber criminals and their digital breadcrumbs. The tip of the iceberg is the “Clear Web” (also called the Surface Web), indexed by Google and other search engines. The very large body of the iceberg, submerged under the virtual water, is the “Deep Web”—anything on the Web that’s not accessible to the search engines (e.g., your bank account). Within the Deep Web lies the “Dark Web,” a region of the iceberg that is difficult to access and can be reached only via specialized networks.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiaWU07i0uc]
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A New AI Assistant for the Elderly
Startup Intuition Robotics emerged from stealth on January 11, 2017, announcing a social robot aimed at keeping older adults active and engaged. The design and actions of the artificial intelligence-based device, ElliQ, make it look and feel less like a traditional robot and more as a friendly and approachable digital companion. It is unveiled this week as part of the exhibition New Old: Designing for our Future Selves at The Design Museum in London and was developed in collaboration with famed industrial designer Yves Béhar and his studio, fuseproject.
The world’s advanced economies are facing today the challenge of responding to the needs of a rapidly aging population (about 15% of people in the United States and 26% in Japan are older than 65). Loneliness and social isolation are serious issues that sometimes accelerate specific health conditions and worsen the physical disabilities of older adults. “We felt that in our next venture we wanted to do something that will have actual meaning and impact in people’s lives,” says CEO and co-founder Dor Skuler, a serial entrepreneur with background in cyber security and cloud computing, explaining the motivation for founding Intuition Robotics.
ElliQ was developed with the help of 24 older adults and their families, providing ongoing feedback to the development team and allowing them to directly observe their experience with the product. Other outside advisors include Professor Guy Hoffman of Cornell University (see his TED talk Robots with Soul) who assisted with making ElliQ socially expressive; Professor Gal Kaminka of Bar Ilan University, an expert on developing robots that are socially intelligent; and Don Norman, an expert on user-centered design (and former VP of Advanced Technologies at Apple and currently the Director of the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego).
In a statement, Yves Béhar said: “The idea of having a robot companion is quite dystopian, especially for older generations. Through years of research, we were able to develop a design language and user experience that feels natural, with subtle expressions to develop a unique bond between ElliQ and its owner. ElliQ could never replace human interaction, but it can be an important motivating factor in keeping older adults healthy and active when living alone.”
The resulting product has a number of components: An LED lighting display which conveys subtle emotional expressions and give the device a friendly and warm personification; a separate screen that operates in a cradle display or in the user’s hand; and a cloud-based component, its first iteration being a chatbot linked to Facebook Messenger. Using machine learning, ElliQ learns the preferences, behavior and personality of her owner, and proactively recommends activities based on that history and recommendations by the owner’s family.
Knowing what to suggest and when and making the device emotive enough so the user likes it, are challenges that the developers of ElliQ have attempted to master. This was important given their goal of differentiating the product from other personal or home robots on the market today. According to Skuler, most existing products are general-purpose in the sense that they are not focused on the needs of older adults. And those that have been developed specifically for this segment of the population, by and large focus on physical disabilities (e.g., assisting with lifting and carrying). Another important difference is being proactive rather than reactive (ala Alexa or Siri), suggesting a relevant activity, at a relevant time, based on daily goals.
Why “ElliQ”? “Girl power,” says Skuler. Elli is the goddess of old age in Norse mythology and she is said to have defeated Thor in a wrestling match. The “Q” was added to make it a unique word in English, so it can be used as the “wake word” for the device. And what’s next for the powerful and intelligent assistant? A trial phase in the homes of older adults in the Bay Area, California.
Originally published on Forbes.com
