How chatbots will change the face of campus technology — from by Jami Morshed
Excerpt:
In the first few months of the new semester hubbub, what if there was an assistant at the beck and call of students to help them navigate the college process? While the campus faculty and staff are likely too busy during those first few days to answer all the questions on students and parent’s minds, chatbots – akin to Siri, Cortana, and Alexa – could provide the ideal digital assistant to make not only these first few days run smoothly, but also the student’s entire time on campus.
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From applying to college, to arriving on campus, declaring a major, signing up courses and eventually graduation, there are a multitude of ways bots can help to streamline the process, maybe as soon as next semester.
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For example, during the application process, a bot could send push notifications to students to remind them about upcoming deadlines, missing documents, or improperly submitted data, and would be available 24/7 to answer student’s questions such as “Am I missing any documents for my application?” or “What’s the deadline for submitting the application fee?”.
The Ultimate Guide to Chatbots: Why they’re disrupting UX and best practices for building — from medium.muz by Joe Toscano
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
The incredible potential of chatbots lies in the ability to individually and contextually communicate one-to-many.
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Right now contextually communicating with bots isn’t something that’s reasonable to ask across the board but there are a few that are doing it well, and I believe this type of interaction will be the standard in the future.
While chatbots are still in their infancy in terms of creative potential, it’s still a very exciting time for creatives trying to understand the best way to use this new technology and how to build the best bot possible.
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Stop wasting money trying to pull people into your ecosystem. Push your content where your users are already active.
Google Assistant bot ecosystem will open to all developers by end of 2016 — from venturebeat.com by Khari Johnson
Excerpt:
Developers and the rest of the world will soon be able to make bots that interact with Google Assistant and new Google devices made public, the company said today in a special presentation in San Francisco.
“The Google Assistant will be our next thriving open ecosystem,” said Scott Huffman, lead engineer of Google Assistant.
The creation of bots for Google Assistant will be possible through Actions on Google, which is due out by early December. A software development kit (SDK) that brings Google Assistant into a range of device not made by Google is due out next year.
First Computer to Match Humans in Conversational Speech Recognition — from technologyreview.com
Human-level speech recognition has been a long time coming.
Chat bots: How talking to your apps became the next big thing — from zdnet.com by Steve Ranger
Apps that can mimic human conversations are one of the hottest technologies around right now. Here’s why.
Excerpt:
Bots are applications that are designed to respond to conversational language. The aim is to create services — whether that’s the ability to order a pizza or to enter a meeting in a calendar — where the dialogue with the app is as natural and apparently unscripted as an interaction you might have with a human.
Chat bots are like narrow versions of digital assistants like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant, designed to perform specific tasks. Interest in bots has rocketed recently and developers are racing to incorporate them into services built on popular messaging apps and websites to create a form of virtual customer services.