Fify claims to be an intelligent fashion discovery and transaction bot. “Fify will have memory and personality to behave just as humans. She will behave differently with different people. She will remember one’s taste and preferences. She will be context aware of what is happening in your world. Fify will first talk only about Fynd Fashion and eventually do all sorts of thing related to fashion — discuss trends, alert you about new arrivals, and even gossip about the latest fad of a movie star,” their blog claims.
But Zuckerberg is just getting started. And he is doubling down on his plan to monetize Facebook by delving into the foggy world of artificial intelligence (AI) in order to have computer software programs called bots, take over sales and customer service functions on Facebook's Messenger platform. This has profound consequences not only for Facebook’s bottom line, but for marketers as well.
This form of artificial intelligence was first developed by MIT Professor Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1960’s and named ELIZA. It wasn’t until 2011, when chatbots had a resurgence with the inception of WeChat in China. Customers could create chatbots on this platform and interact with one another seamlessly. In 2016, Facebook introduced its own chatbots which paved the way for this form of artificial intelligence to enter and interact with mainstream media consumption.
^ "From Russia With Love" (PDF). Retrieved 2007-12-09. Psychologist and Scientific American: Mind contributing editor Robert Epstein reports how he was initially fooled by a chatterbot posing as an attractive girl in a personal ad he answered on a dating website. In the ad, the girl portrayed herself as being in Southern California and then soon revealed, in poor English, that she was actually in Russia. He became suspicious after a couple of months of email exchanges, sent her an email test of gibberish, and she still replied in general terms. The dating website is not named. Scientific American: Mind, October–November 2007, page 16–17, "From Russia With Love: How I got fooled (and somewhat humiliated) by a computer". Also available online.
“It’s hard to balance that urge to just dogpile the latest thing when you’re feeling like there’s a land grab or gold rush about to happen all around you and that you might get left behind. But in the end quality wins out. Everyone will be better off if there’s laser focus on building great bot products that are meaningfully differentiated.” — Ryan Block, Cofounder of Begin.com
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In the early 90’s, the Turing test, which allows determining the possibility of thinking by computers, was developed. It consists in the following. A person talks to both the person and the computer. The goal is to find out who his interlocutor is — a person or a machine. This test is carried out in our days and many conversational programs have coped with it successfully.
In one particularly striking example of how this rather limited bot has made a major impact, U-Report sent a poll to users in Liberia about whether teachers were coercing students into sex in exchange for better grades. Approximately 86% of the 13,000 Liberian children U-Report polled responded that their teachers were engaged in this despicable practice, which resulted in a collaborative project between UNICEF and Liberia’s Minister of Education to put an end to it.
The word robot is derived from the Czech noun robota meaning “labor”, and is an accomplishment of the cubist painter and writer Josef Capek, older brother of novelist and playwright Karel Capek. The word robot first appeared in 1920 in the Karel Capek’s play “RUR” (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”) and since then this play popularized the word invented by playwright’s brother.[3]
Interestingly, the as-yet unnamed conversational agent is currently an open-source project, meaning that anyone can contribute to the development of the bot’s codebase. The project is still in its earlier stages, but has great potential to help scientists, researchers, and care teams better understand how Alzheimer’s disease affects the brain. A Russian version of the bot is already available, and an English version is expected at some point this year.
Efforts by servers hosting websites to counteract bots vary. Servers may choose to outline rules on the behaviour of internet bots by implementing a robots.txt file: this file is simply text stating the rules governing a bot's behaviour on that server. Any bot that does not follow these rules when interacting with (or 'spidering') any server should, in theory, be denied access to, or removed from, the affected website. If the only rule implementation by a server is a posted text file with no associated program/software/app, then adhering to those rules is entirely voluntary – in reality there is no way to enforce those rules, or even to ensure that a bot's creator or implementer acknowledges, or even reads, the robots.txt file contents. Some bots are "good" – e.g. search engine spiders – while others can be used to launch malicious and harsh attacks, most notably, in political campaigns.[2]
Facebook is among the leading networks for consumers to directly interact with their choice of brand. Over a billion people in a month use this platform to directly get in touch with businesses. A survey reveals that 56% of consumers would prefer any and all form of grievances to be addressed and solved via chat rather than telephonically. Furthermore, consumers expect the response time to be less than 5 minutes per grievance.
By relentless understanding of marketer needs, Zuckerberg has managed to convince marketers to move gigantic budgets from traditional advertising to Facebook in just a few years. As proof, according to eMarketer, digital ad spending will surpass TV Ad spending by early next year. In just a few more years, marketing budgets will be predominantly digital, while traditional TV and Radio advertising will follow in the red ink drenched footsteps of newspaper ads.
Although NBC Politics Bot was a little rudimentary in terms of its interactions, this particular application of chatbot technology could well become a lot more popular in the coming years – particularly as audiences struggle to keep up with the enormous volume of news content being published every day. The bot also helped NBC determine what content most resonated with users, which the network will use to further tailor and refine its content to users in the future.
They have an intuitive visual interface for those without a coding background, but developers will like the editable front-end and customization options. While you can build a bot for free, a lot of the more complex (and interesting) tools are only available with Chatfuel Pro accounts. Either way, it might be helpful to know that Chatfuel integrates with Hootsuite Inbox using the Facebook Messenger handover protocol.
