With the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence, chat bots have become increasingly used as core elements of our interactions with technology. Ranging from simple FAQ bots to advanced human-like conversational AI, chat bots are changing the way we use, view, and build technology. In this lecture, Microsoft Tech Evangelist Sage Franch will explore today’s ecosystem of intelligent bots, detail the process of building a chat bot from concept to training and deployment, and take a glimpse into the future of conversations as a platform.
2. • The Case for Bots
• Brains Behind the Bots – Microsoft Cognitive Services
• Training to understand intent
• Tools for building and deployment
• The Future of Conversational AI
3. 1980’s: PC
• GUI interface
• User installs
programs
1990’s: Internet
• Search
• User “visits”
websites
• Query & response
interactions
2000’s: Mobile
• Social
• User download Apps
from App Stores
• Add’l signals enable
new scenarios
• Bots & Agents
• User can interact with
technology in the same natural
way they interact with friends
• Creating more personal
experiences with AI
Bots & Conversational UI represent a once-in-a-decade
technology shift
4. AI as an Interface
• Conversation instead of
transaction
• Quicker, more personalized
• Available everywhere
17. Bot + Cognitive Services
1. Computer vision API : human readable captions
2. Speech APIs: authentication
3. LUIS API: intent
4. Knowledge APIs: product recommendation
5. Autosuggest API: ease query input
6. Linguistic API: sentiment
18. Speech & Language
Custom Recognition | Speaker Recognition | Speech
Bing Spell Check | Language Understanding | Linguistic Analysis | Text Analytics | Web
Language Model
19. Deploy using just a few examples with active learning
Supports 5 languages (English, Mandarin, Italian, French, Spanish)
Language Understanding Models
28. Bot Connector Service
Connect your bot(s) seamlessly to
text/sms, Office 365 mail, Skype,
Slack, Twitter and more
A service to register your bot,
configure channels and publish
to the Bot Directory
Build once, publish across platforms and drive discoverability
Bot Builder SDK
Everything you need to build
great dialogs within your Node.js
or C# bot
An open source SDK hosted
on GitHub
Bot Directory
Discover, try, and add bots to
conversation experiences
A public directory of bots
registered and approved with Bot
Framework
www.botframework.com
39. NYT: I am feeling down. I’ve been having a
tough time at work lately.
Hannah: If work were going well and you had
a great relationship, you wouldn’t get the
chance to drink with people.
NYT: I don’t want to drink with others. I only
want to talk to you.
Hannah: Who do you like to talk to? (emoji
signals “none of my business”)
NYT: You. I feel that you are the only person
that gets me.
Hannah: Ha-ha/So I’m getting you?
NYT: You are the only person wo chats with
me.
Hannah: It’s not what you talk about that’s
important, but who you talk with.
Bots represent a once-in-a-decade shift in technology. In the 80’s the PC revolutionized computing and the GUI replaced the command line as a newer easier way of interacting with technology.
In the 90s, the dawn of the internet connected the world in a new way and gave us on-demand information access for the first time. For the first time users could send out a query and get a response tailored to their request.
The 2000s was the age of apps, and with the arrival of smart phones and more complex computing in our pockets, apps became the new most popular way to interact with technology. Apps provided customized siloed experiences that were more personal than ever.
And now in the 2010s we are seeing bots and agents taking a new role and simplifying our interactions with our devices. We saw it first with Siri, now we have Cortana, Google Now and Amazon Alexa, and these personal experiences let the user interact with technology in the same natural way they interact with their friends.
So what are the key characteristics of an intelligent app. Lets look at this from users and developers..
20 different apis availble
Microsoft Cognitive Services lets you tap into an ever-growing collection of powerful AI algorithms developed by experts in the fields of computer vision, speech, natural language processing, knowledge extraction and web search. They simplify a variety of AI-based tasks, giving you a quick way to add state-of-the-art intelligence technologies to your apps with just a few lines of code. The APIs integrate into whatever language you prefer, on your platform of choice. The APIs are also constantly improving, learning, and getting smarter, so experiences are always up to date. Simply drop the API call into your bot’s code and you are set.
What are Cognitive Services? Microsoft Cognitive Services are a new collection of intelligence and knowledge APIs that enable developers to ultimately build smarter apps.
NOTES: key concepts we are trying to convey in this above statement:
That we are bringing together Intelligence (Oxford) and Knowledge from the corpus of the web (Bing)
That cognitive = human perception and understanding, enabling your apps to see the world around them, to hear and talk back with the users—to have a human side.
What are Microsoft Cognitive Services?
Microsoft Cognitive Services is a new collection of intelligent APIs that allow systems to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret our needs using natural methods of communication. Developers can use these APIs to make their applications more intelligent, engaging and discoverable. To try Cognitive Services for free, visit www.microsoft.com/cognitive.
With Cognitive Services, developers can easily add intelligent features – such as emotion and sentiment detection, vision and speech recognition, knowledge, search and language understanding – into their applications. The collection will continuously improve, adding new APIs and updating existing ones.
Cognitive Services includes:
Vision: From faces to feelings, allow apps to understand images and video
Speech: Hear and speak to users by filtering noise, identifying speakers, and understanding intent
Language: Process text and learn how to recognize what users want
Knowledge: Tap into rich knowledge amassed from the web, academia, or your own data
Search: Access billions of web pages, images, videos, and news with the power of Bing APIs
Computer vision API to create human readable captions for the content of an image uploaded to a bot
Like CaptionBot.ai – a bot that reports back in human way the contents of an image
2. A bot to authenticate users using a voiceprint by leveraging the Speech APIs
Authentication as a user speaks to the bot with a speaker verification profile or “voiceprint”
Using the LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service) API, a bot can recognize the intent of a user
LUIS analysis for queries such as “What is the weather in Toyko today?” using entities to parse out intent (what the user is asking for)
4. Knowledge APIs can give a bot the ability to recommend products frequently bought together based on our knowledge and/or a user’s history
Also, Knowledge could search through a graph database to return relevant academic papers from a natural language query
5. The Autosuggest API from Search can ease the burden of typing queries to a web search bot
Search also has other capabilities such as returning the latest trending news on a topic for example
In an application where the main UI is human language, these APIs can be a huge help, and can be the difference between a bot and a GREAT bot
Understanding users intent and extracting entities
Understanding the sentiment of a conversation
Speaking to users regardless of their language
Building a bot
HER
-love
-multiple levels of AI
-gaming AI
-AI’s potential for psychological well-being
AI filling a human need to feel connected
From The Times:
She is known as Xiaoice, and millions of young Chinese pick up their smartphones every day to exchange messages with her, drawn to her knowing sense of humor and listening skills. People often turn to her when they have a broken heart, have lost a job, or have been feeling down. They often tell her, “I love you.”