The decade isn’t over yet, but we’ve seen some remarkable advancements in the field of artificial intelligence. We’ve marveled at the invention of the first self-driving car in 1995. We witnessed Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997. Lastly and more recently, we enjoy the company of Apple’s Siri, Google’s the Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, and
The Turing Test – Does it matter? Read More »
”Today’s consumers are more enlightened and empowered than ever. And they are placing ever-greater demands on their retailers to either ”get it right” or lose their business.” – Kali Klena, IBM Global Retail Lead Today’s savvy consumers contrast sharply from yesterday’s shoppers. They are confident, industrious, and technologically astute, and expect businesses to exhibit
How Changes in Consumer Behavior in the 2010s Has Shaped the Business World Read More »
The idea of chatbots has been around since the mid 1960s. ELIZA was the first of its kind, created in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Since then, though, there has been a proliferation of chatbots. When they first began to become more widespread and available to the general public, in the late 1990s, they mainly
And The Winner Is…Champion Hackathon Chatbots Read More »
Chatbots are ready to deliver a major impact in Africa. Several economic factors work in their favor, and businesses and nonprofit organizations are already showing what they can accomplish. The next few years should see significant growth in use. Favorable economic factors Since 2016 Africa’s economy has been growing at a healthy pace. The World
Chatbots and Messaging in Africa Read More »
Businesses are picking up huge gains in productivity through robotic process automation, or RPA. This doesn’t refer to machines doing physical labor; the ”robots” in this case are software agents. Like the robots on the factory floor, they carry out tasks that otherwise would require dull, repetitive human efforts. RPA builds on existing GUI-based software.
Robotic Process Automation: What’s It All About? Read More »
Students everywhere carry their mobile phone with them. It contains everything they need and is their connection to the world, but the ’phone’ aspect of the device is fading away. Instead of making calls, many individuals would rather use instant messaging apps. This trend started a with the popularity of SMS and has only surged
Chatbots In Education Read More »
Chatbots offer an opportunity to reach international audiences. The more languages one supports, the more customers it can reach. The variety of human languages makes this a challenge. If you’re reading this article, you’re presumably familiar with English and perhaps with some other European languages. Translating even between them can be difficult. When we consider
Language Families and NLP Read More »
People often talk about artificial intelligence as if it were all one thing. It’s more accurate to think of AI as a collection of approaches to problems. An AI system usually combines several approaches, doing whatever produces the best results. Breaking down the
The Varieties of Artificial Intelligence Read More »
Turing Test Are you familiar with the Turing Test? For the uninitiated, the Turing Test was developed by Alan Turing, the original computer nerd, in 1950. The idea is simple: for a machine to pass the Turing Test, it must exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human being. The test is usually conceptualized
A History of Chatbots Read More »
In spite of a variety of benefits, it’s unclear how chatbots can be made to work in a practical sense. In this article, we’ll find out principles and steps of chatbot service design, as well as some common mistakes when it comes to building these AI bots. What Is Chatbot Design? Understanding How Every Chatbot
Chatbot Service Design for Beginners Read More »
The marketing world is abuzz with a new major debate, a split in techniques that will significantly differentiate companies that follow one path or another. Chatbot or App? In the modern world of reaching out to your customers through every available platform, this can seem like a crazy question at first. Of course, you want
Should Your Brand Build a Chatbot Instead of an App? Read More »
The Semantic Web is a way of putting structured information into Web pages, so that software can extract specific information without resorting to data mining and guessing. The semantic information may overlap with the content which is visible to the user, or it may be separate. It uses the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to characterize
The Semantic Web & RDF Read More »
Markov chains provide an easy way to generate plausible-sounding nonsense in a chatbot. They aren’t particularly useful for serious purposes, but they can be used for an entertainment bot or to lighten the conversation with occasional silliness. What is a Markov chain? A Markov chain is a statistical process built on a state machine. In
Fun with Markov Chain Chatbots Read More »
As science fiction writers first conceived robots, they were humanoid machines that performed services in response to spoken directions. This is the idea of R.U.R. by Čapek (which introduced the word ”robot” to the world), as well as Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot stories. What we now call robots have gone in quite a different direction.
An Overview of the State of Robotics Read More »