Gadgetory

I like big butts and I cannot lie so let me drop some truth on you gang bots are the word of the day and you're starting to see them absolutely everywhere so let's dig into it what is a bot a BOTS a piece of software that lets you do things you type words into it using natural language the software understands and then it does something the companies are already starting to use this to do everything from customer service to letting you buy a new pair of shoes in fact you may have seen a couple weeks ago when Microsoft unveiled its new bot platform and it introduced it to the world using a teenage bot named cave you could interact with on Twitter unfortunately paid turned out to be huge racist the more you interact with it the worse it got Microsoft was hugely embarrassed it wasn't exactly the start to the bot revolution that some of us had been hoping for but Sasha await a because there's a new bot maker in town it's Facebook and this week at the f8 Developer Conference in San Francisco they told us exactly what they have in mind we think that you should just be able to message a business in the same way you'd message a friend so today we're launching messenger platform so you can build box for messenger and it's a simple platform it's powered by artificial intelligence so you can build natural language services to communicate directly with people so Facebook's great idea for BOTS is that they belong inside messenger I thought we'd add a few of them my messenger and see how they do so this is Pancho Pancho is a weather bot or a weather cache to be more specific and if you go ahead and ask it what the weather is apparently it will tell you so you can see I've said what's the weather and it is asking me to tell it where I live what about Bernal Heights that's the neighborhood I live what do you mean so I live in Bernal Heights is it in San Francisco California totally it it's a response to how is the weather in Bernal Heights is may I send you weekday morning weather up tickets at 8:00 a.m. so I'm not completely baffled by what's happening inside of this chat pod all I wanted to know was the weather in my neighborhood and it sent me a picture of a cat on a treadmill and asked me what my New Year's resolutions are that sounds like I made up a joke but that was my actual interaction with this Jap lot good rule of thumb going forward never ask a cat the weather let's see what it's like to order flowers we can do the Barrington Get Well bear yeah you keep tapping it because you want to see it and then nothing happens you can just see a badly cropped picture of a bear and some sugar cookies why don't you want the note to say we'll just go as sorry I cheated on you with your best friend at your house in your garage while you were there celebrating your grandma's 100th birthday oh now what's my billing address are I'm just gonna say it this is a completely exhausted way to order flowers like I'm actually rather just call somebody at this point so it's a cliche when a new technology comes along to say that it's not ready for primetime but in the case of BOTS they're really not even ready for like afternoon television they're not ready to go on Ellen show I'd say they're ready for Adult Swim midnight TV something you watch when you're a little bit stoned or drunk and not expecting very much and that's surprising because BOTS are an old technology it was 2001 when we were all adding smarter child to our AOL Instant Messenger and using it to look up movie times in the weather and so the story with Facebook messengers BOTS really isn't how far they've come it's how much farther than they have left to go what's the difference between a guitar and a fish what you can't tuna fish and say I told that joke to my wife and she left me