Today, Microsoft detailed its AI ambitions and took the time to sketch out a plan towards its commitment of making artificial intelligence ubiquitous. In addition to broadening the scope of its AI tools, and its virtual assistant Cortana beyond the confines of desktop and mobile, the Redmond giant also officially unveiled its new chatbot called Zo.
This is Microsoft’s second attempt at creating a socially active chatbot and we are not looking forward to conversing with yet another racist ranting chatbot — like the previous Twitter bot Tay. This can be seen as the second step in the evolution of social bots from Redmond, which was released to the masses alongside other initiatives at the AI Day event in San Francisco.
About a week ago, there had been sightings of a conversational bot named Zo from Microsoft on the messaging app Kik. Several users even suggested that the Redmond giant is providing early access to its new chatbot to users over at Kik. And today, it has officially lifted the veil off its next social experiment and is hoping that it won’t act out and spam users like Tay did.
Tay can be called a social disaster who couldn’t gel with the masses and learned hatred and vulgarity in an instant. Within a day, the chatbot had turned people against itself for being racist, harmful and supporting Hitler. It spewed hate and thus, Microsoft had to apologize and pull back on their very first social chatbot from the micro-blogging platform.
But, Zo is nothing like Tay. Users, which Microsoft mentions is already more than 100k, have mentioned that the said chatbot is more rigid and grounded as compared to its older brethren. It most likely most likely won’t spiral down the racist rant pathway, which was often taken by Tay. It caused a lot of trouble for both the users and Microsoft. The official website describes her as under:
Zo is built using the vast social content of the Internet. She learns from human interactions to respond emotionally and intelligently, providing a unique viewpoint, along with manners and emotional expressions. But she also has strong checks and balances in place to protect her from exploitation.
This time around, Microsoft has tried to emulate the capabilities of its Chinese and Japanese counterparts Xiaoice and Rinna respectively. It is powered by the same technology stack which is behind the success of these two chatbots. Currently, Microsoft is making Zo available only on Kik but plans to bring her to other social and conversational channels such as Skype and Facebook Messenger in future.
Talking about the launch, Harry Shum, executive VP of Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Research group, says,
It’s a very personal experience. We’re really moving from a world where we have to understand computers to a world where they will understand us and our intent, from machine-centric to human-centric, from perceptive to cognitive and from rational to emotional.
Also, Microsoft took the wraps of its newest website meant to collate together all links, resources and updates on the company’s various AI-related products and services at a single place. It also mentions in the official blog post that company’s bot framework unveiled earlier this year has been adopted by over 67,000 developers. To make it even more robust, Microsoft is planning to introduce some required add-ons such as a new Microsoft Cognitive Service, QnA Maker including the updates for the Language Understanding Intelligence Service to the framework.
The Redmond giant also showed off something similar to the infamous Slack bot, which assists you in learning how to use its enterprise chat application effectively. Called WhoBot, the primary aim of this addition to Microsoft Teams is to successfully recognize someone based on the documents they write and the conversations they have.
Cortana is also stepping out of its comfort zone and will make an appearance in one of Harman Kardon’s smart speakers. Taking another cross-platform step, Cortana Skills Kit will allow developers to take advantage of bots created with the Bot Framework and publish them to Cortana as a new skill or repurpose Alexa code to build a Cortana skill. That’s some impressive AI technology and a step in the right direction.
