In another world, Facebook may still be trusted. So they built it
Facebook Horizon is a virtual world simulator where you can hang out, socialize, and even build your own virtual town. It looks like a VR-first Second Life which launched way back in 2003, a year prior to “TheFacebook".
Facebook wants to take over your television with a clip-on camera for video calling, AR gaming and content co-watching. If you can get past the creepiness, the new Portal TV lets you hang out with friends on your home’s biggest screen. It’s a fresh product category that could give the s…
Amazon releases products that are not quite ready for mass market - intentionally.
Amazon have released 3 new products at their latest launch event in Seattle.
Airbuds that have 2 modes - noise reduction and pass through, where the microphones and speakers are use to transfer sound through with no delay. Mark my words - AR sound will be the next big things. Always in hearing devices will allow us to augment the audio we hear and this potentially will arrive before always on AR visuals.
Amazon Alexa powered glasses - again no AR here even though they are glasses. These are not designed to listen to music on, but have an AI assistant available at all times.
Last, and weirdest, is the Echo Loop. It’s a big fat ring that you can use to ask Alexa questions and hear the answers.
You tap a button to activate Alexa, and the ring will vibrate to let you know it’s time to talk. You then ask your hand the question you have in mind, and afterwards cup the ring to your ear — right up to it, because this speaker is tiny. A second or two later, out comes Alexa’s voice, sounding like an old transistor radio, telling you the weather in Barcelona or whatever.
It’s not for everybody, which is why it, along with the glasses, are part of the new Day One Edition series of questionable devices. But if you can think of a way it might be useful, be assured: It works as advertised.
About a month and a half ago, KFC quietly followed 11 Herbs and Spices on Twitter and then waited to see if anyone would notice...
After a month, a Twitter user called Edge did...
The campaign was done by Wieden+Kennedy
“We planted this on Twitter over a month ago,” said Freddie Powell, creative director at Wieden+Kennedy. “Frankly, we weren’t sure if anybody was going to find it. Sometimes you just have to put stuff out into the universe and cross your fingers that the internet will work its magic.”
Since then, the fried chicken food chain commissioned a painting to present to the man who figured out their Twitter mystery.
KFC has been owning social for a while, with low cost topical gimmicks which have received huge amounts of PR. These include
Snapchat plans to launch a new augmented reality art platform featuring pop artist Jeff Koons and others. It will allow art to be pinned to specific locations..
Snapchat to launch augmented reality art platform tomorrow | TechCrunch
Snapchat plans to launch a new augmented reality art platform featuring pop artist Jeff Koons and others. It will allow art to be pinned to specific locations in augmented reality so users can see it when they hold up their phones in the right spot. Snapchat will solicit sign-ups from artists who want their art added to the platform.
No longer is the modern canvas confined to being flat. Fostered by the advent of powerful projectors and more advanced methods of mapping, large-scale walls, sharp edged buildings and peculiarly-shaped ...
Hologram announced on Tuesday the world’s largest global cellular network dedicated to IoT devices, capable of working on 600 cellular network.
Pricing is very attractive, e.g. if you want to do 500K month it’s 60 cents in the US. The cheapest Canadian (Zone 2) offering is a buck thirty, but that gets you a Mb per month.
Hologram announced on Tuesday the world’s largest global cellular network dedicated to Internet of Things (IoT) devices, capable of working on 600 cellular networks in 200 countries
…allowing customers to choose from a multitude of options, down to the kilobyte.
Bots are now everywhere—they’re “the new app” according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Although bots just made their commercial debut last year, you can call already call up thousands of them on your voice, text, and messaging services. Facebook’s chatbot platform Messenger, launched in April, already offers more than 11,000 bots and “tens of thousands” of developers are reportedly working on more.
One such company jumping on the band wagon is Lemonade. Lemonade are attempting to shake up the insurance market by using artificial intelligence to cut costs and make a more instant service.
The company uses a chatbot interface inside of their app to take applications and claims, through a series of tickboxes, forms and touch finger signatures. The company claims that it takes 90 seconds to start, and just 3 minutes to make a claim.
The app uses Maya, a “Personal Insurance Assistant”, to guide you through the process. In the into screens, the app says that it is powered by AI, but Maya does not introduce herself as a bot at any point. Maya has a profile picture and a star rating, as if she is just another sales representative. At first I though that maybe the first few messages were automatic and I would eventually be transitioned to a sales member under the Maya persona, but I was wrong. The app UX even features a typing state - even though a bot can answer instantly.
Startup company Soul Machines are doing a similar thing with their chatbot for the disabled. It features a 3D virtual assistant, which can answer questions and do computerised tasks.
So why are people making bots that act like people?
We humans are narcissistic. We create in our own image, project human qualities on animals and inanimate objects, and fall head-over-heels with the ones that best reflect our humanity back to ourselves.
From the classical tale of Pygmalion, a sculptor who falls in love with a statue, to the futurist film Ex Machina where an intelligent robot successfully tricks an entire human cast, our fascination with human-like constructs spans the centuries and creates ripples across fields from science to art.
With chatbot technology on the uptrend, developers are trying to infuse a convincing dose of “human-ness” to conversational AI. Since people intrinsically place more premium on an artificial intelligence that communicates like a real person vs. one that responds robotically, businesses are hoping to better engage their markets using simulated human conversation, however not everyone thinks this is a good thing:
There’s a debate in AI circles right now is whether bots should present themselves as humans or machines, and if gender should even apply in either case. I don’t think as a industry we’ve agreed that to humanize our agents is the best thing to do
Dennis Mortensen of x.ai
Thought point: Why are most the virtual assistants out there female?
What if we can’t tell a human from a bot?
Inability to distinguish human from bot has major implications for society. Every day, scam artists send millions of automated messages that trick victims into handing over cash or sensitive personal information. Twitter estimates that approximately 23 million of their active accounts are automated bots. To jumpstart their growth, even respected Silicon Valley startups like Airbnb used Craigslist bots posing as rent seekers to convince homeowners to list on their site instead.
While “humanness” in artificial intelligence allows us to scale positive human qualities like empathy, compassion, respect, and kindness, we can also scale malice, negativity, indifference, manipulation, and hate if we are not careful. When we share white supremacist views with Tay or curse at Siri, we are not only mistreating technology, but teaching our computers how we want to be treated.
Development of bots without personalities
Google initially purposefully avoided humanizing its bot creation: the Google Assistant acted as an all-purpose agent with no distinct personality (although its voice is female). But of the major tech companies, Google was virtually alone in this approach. Most had opted to present a strong human persona with clearly feminine voices, including Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana (only Siri lets you switch easily to a male voice).
Since the creation however, Google found a natural sounding voice assistant can only achieve so much without being relate-able to its human users. That's why Google is now taking a page out of Apple's and Microsoft's books in hopes to build a character, and even a backstory, for the new Google Assistant. The company has turned to Ryan Germick, head of the Google Doodle team, and freelance artist Emma Coats who will help shape the new personality.
The more comfortable people feel while interacting with AI bot the more likely they will be to keep using it, which equates to more voice searches for Google.
Extreme content has always existed on social media. But in more recent years, it seems to have reached disruptive levels. While some have blamed Twitter’s troll problem for its slow growth and Reddit has been called an incubator for white supremacists, neither network has been effective in its efforts to curb pervasive harassment issues. But recently, it’s gotten so bad that advertisers are worried and are pulling their ads.
Over the past couple of weeks, companies have been pulling advertising from YouTube over Google’s inability to ensure ads won’t appear next to hateful and offensive content. The Wall Street Journal reports that YouTube videos centered around racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic views are still scooping up ads from brands like Coca-Cola, Amazon.com, and Microsoft. There was even a jaguar pre roll placed before an ISIS recruitment video. Google has promised companies it would solve the issue and implement better tools and moderation practices.
On Friday, Wall Street Journal reporter Jack Nicas tweeted a screenshot of an ad for a YouTube Red original movie appearing as pre-roll on a user-submitted video called “Michelle Obama Dancing to Alabama Ni**er.” The revelation came moments after it was announced that Walmart, Pepsi Co. and Starbucks are among more advertisers that had either suspended or pulled their spend.
So what’s the deal? Surely people know that an ad before a video, does not mean endorsement of a video?
Adweek ran a survey which found that 1/3 of people when they see an ad around controversial content, see it as an endorsement by that brand. Which I personally find surprising. But remember, we work in advertising. We know how ad buys work and how random they are. And moreover, as a marketing manager there is nothing more scary that seeing a screenshot on Twitter of your bands logo next to something they don’t want to be associated with.
But surely this is not just an issue online...
So what now?
These ad issues occur when people do a general buy, casting the net wide over the whole ad network.
Currently advertisers mainly blacklist certain sites, but with a never ending list of controversial sites, it is impossible to keep up. We may end up in a place where it is safer to whitelist (allow) certain sites, which is way more labour intensive and costly.
Conceived as part of Google’s Android Experiments initiative, Magic Calendar is a response to the question, “What if there was a calendar that combines the merits of both paper and smartphone?”. The answer is an Android app partnered with an interconnected paper-thin e-ink color display. Everything on the mobile device’s calendar is mirrored physically on an always-on display designed for the wall or on the desk, making sharing events and schedules between people easier and more natural.
Facebook’s New Video Ad Format Aims to Make Ecommerce Easier
Today the site is launching a new ad format called Collection. A video sits on the top half of the ad unit with four recommended products below. Retailers either select the products they want to feature manually or Facebook pulls popular products from a retailer’s site.
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