Hi Alexa, is the monetisation conversation moot? – Global Editors Network But voice AI technologies are on their way to massively changing access to content. ComScore has gone as far as to predict that by 2020, 50 per cent of all searches will be voice searches. And Amy Webb wrote that humans talking to machines represents the next major shift in our news information ecosystem, making voice perhaps the next ‘big threat’ for journalism. How can you reach your audiences where they are? How chatbots are colonizing politics Chatbots, one of the hottest trends in consumer technology, are invading the 2016 election, with Democrats and progressives deploying the artificial intelligence-powered software to do things like register voters and keep supporters engaged with Hillary Clinton's campaign. Type a question or statement to an online chatbot, and it will attempt to respond like a human would. They can be pulled up with a few key strokes on popular services like Facebook Messenger or via SMS text. Though chatbot technology has existed for years, it's entering the mainstream thanks in part to products like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Echo, which have quickly taught people that having a conversation with a machine isn't all that strange. Story Continued Below Now, some in politics are trying to harness the power of bots to influence the presidential election.
How to track customer journeys in Slack MailClark blog, Slack integrations (Email, Twitter, Facebook) At MailClark, we’re dedicated to helping people focus on the work and communication that matters. To do this, we help customers centralize their work and knowledge in one place. It’s why we’ve built two-way syncs between external accounts (e.g. email, Facebook, Twitter) and Slack. And why we’ve invested in a seamless Google OAuth experience to connect Gmail accounts and Slack. In order to build a better product, we turn to customer behavior and conversations as sources of truth. The problem that most teams face is all of their information is fragmented, making it difficult to see product behavior, bot interactions, and human conversations in one place.
Watch: Time-lapse video of every Seattle sunset, created by engineer’s Twitter bot From the 19th floor of the Smith Tower, Alan Hussey's Twitter bot is capturing Seattle sunsets. Now you'll never miss another sunset again. If you’ve ever been stuck inside and missed what you suspected was a spectacular sunset, you can rest easy now. Alan Hussey, a front-end software engineer who works for software company EnergySavvy on the 19th floor of Smith Tower, has created a Twitter bot that posts a time-lapse video of the sunset every evening. Building on software created by some of his coworkers, Hussey added the finishing touches to get it set up and running as well as adding the weather software for the bot.
How the Bot-y Politic Influenced This Election If your political conversations on social media seem mechanical and predictable, it might be because you are debating with a robot. A study published the day before the election found an estimated 400,000 bots operating on Twitter that were tweeting—and being retweeted—at a remarkable pace, generating nearly 20 percent of all election-related messages. Besides being numerous, these bots are also quite influential, and capable of distorting the online debate, according to authors Alessandro Bessi and Emilio Ferrara of the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute. One thing remains mysterious: who is creating them? That’s still impossible to determine, Ferrara told MIT Technology Review in a discussion about his study, conducted over a month this fall, a period that included all three presidential debates. Below is an edited transcript.
NPR is building an analytics bot that emphasizes caring over clicks For years, journalists have railed against pageviews and uniques, twin metrics that have established supremacy over much of the Internet. Their argument, all tidied up, goes like this: Pageviews and uniques tend to emphasize frivolous content (think cat videos) at the expense of time-intensive journalism. The metrics can be gamed by publishers with the money and inclination to buy traffic. And a lack of standardization throughout the industry has led to confusion among advertisers and outlets about the value of a click.
‘Robots Will Not Replace Journalists’: In Conversation With Bertrand Pecquerie, CEO of the Global… Post originally published on Sourcefabric.org Interview by Sarah Wilson, Communications Assistant at Sourcefabric It’s funny how anachronisms can stick. Microsoft Word’s ‘save’ button still uses a floppy disk icon, vinyl has made a triumphant comeback, and if you Google the word ‘journalist’, your results will still be dominated by images of men in trilby hats with a little piece of paper tucked into the band. The news industry has, however, come a long way since the days of rushing into a telephone box to call an editor. Quartz launches its Bot Studio with $240K from Knight, and plans for Slack and Echo Quartz is betting big on bots. The Atlantic Media-owned outlet is getting a $240,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to launch Quartz Bot Studio, a group focused on developing three bot-related projects in the coming year, for everything from messaging platforms like Slack to voice interfaces like the Amazon Echo (disclosure: Knight is a supporter of Nieman Lab). Quartz will contribute its own resources to the Studio as well, and intends for the projects to continue after its first year.Quartz has already made significant headway in bot experimentation.