Microsoft's AI Bot

Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence Chat Bot

Microsoft has developed a new artificial intelligence chat bot which tends to claim that it would be smarter the more one talk to it. Tay, the so-called bot has been built by Microsoft Technology and Research together with Bing team for the purpose of conducting research on conversational understanding. The Bing team had developed a related conversational bot, XiaoIce, for Chinese market in 2014.

Microsoft executives had dubbed XiaoIce `Cortana’s little sister’ after the company’s voice-activated Cortana personal assistant software of Redmond, Washington.The real world focus of the bot is to enable researchers to experiment and learn how people tend to talk to each other. Microsoft states that for bot which is available through Twitter as well as messaging platforms Kik and GroupMe, AI has been doing the role of a millennial and emojis have been included in the vocabulary and is clearly aimed at 18-24 years olds.

The bot seems to have little useful function for users though it has the potential of three varied method of communication and its website tay.ai tends to boast that the AI can talk through text, play games like guessing the meaning of a string of emojis and make comments on the photos sent to it.

Tay Designed to Engage & Entertain People

Till the time of writing, the bot had accumulated around 3,500 followers on Twitter but had sent over 14,000 messages, responding to questions, statements as well as general abuse within a matter of few seconds. The about section of Tay’s website stated the `Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online via casual and playful conversation.

Tay tends to work depending on public data and with editorial inputs which have been created by staff and comedian. Microsoft has informed that `public data which has been anonymised is the primary data source of Tay and that data has been modelled, cleaned and filtered by the team creating Tay’. Besides the meme-tastic appeal of the bot, there seems to be a grave side to the research behind the AI. Making machine capable of communicating in a natural and human way is a main challenge for learning procedures.

Effort of Service to Comprehend How Humans Speak

Google too had recently updated its Inbox mail service recommending answers to emails and the smart reply feature offers three probable responses which are recommended by Google’s AI. Similar to Tay, Google informs that the more one uses smart replies, the better they will get. If a user desires to share with Tay, the bot tend to track the user’s nickname, gender, zip code, favourite food as well as the relationship status.

Users could delete their profiles on submission of a request through the Tay.ai contact form. In the field of virtual assistants and chat bots, Facebook’s M is also experimenting with the use of artificial intelligence in completing tasks. Though it has been partly controlled by humans, currently the systems are being condition to book restaurants and respond to some questions. The core of the service is an effort to comprehend how humans tend to speak and the best way to respond to them