Listen to these 3 people share how AI is reshaping human’ behavior

You might think that Terminator shows where we are today in terms of the level of AI. Although the explosive growth in information science and machine learning has led to an AI boom, we’re still very far from what the movies show.

Before listening to the below videos talking about how AI is helping humans, let’s try to understand what this is. There are many Artificial Intelligence definitions out there, but I’ll take the below one for a basic introduction:

AI is the field of study of intelligent agents: any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals.

Wikipedia

5 Chatbots that combat fake news on the COVID19 (Updated)

Since the Covid19 arrived in Europe and the alarm state was officially declared in several countries, there have been several initiatives to combat the fake news and avoid a feeling of panic.

First infographics on how the virus was spread out and tips to not get infected were released in newspapers, blogs and government websites raising awareness and claiming a civic duty.

Numbers were increasing as well as fake news on how to prevent the infection or the syntomps. Below, I’ve gathered 5 good examples of how official institutions have used messaging apps such as WhatsApp to combat fake news and bring information closer to citizens:

Bots, channels and trolls leading the Catalan movement this fall

These last two weeks Catalonia has lived a wave of protests, incidents and peaceful walks as a way of showing rejection to the imprisonments of nine Catalan politicians and the Spanish government attitude against this resolution.

What has made these unanimous marches different from two years ago –when the referendum happened– or early this year –when the trials took place– is that this time citizens are been led by apps or channels on Telegram rather than known figures.

These two chatbots will help you on your day-to-day work

I usually get the question on which is the chatbot I like the most, so I’ve decided to share two good initiatives that help me on my routine and to speed up some of the tasks.

When I first interact with a bot, I try to get some of the below out of them:

• Presentation – To know what the bot can and cannot do
• Information displayed in different ways: combination of text, buttons, images.
• Proactive, but not spammy
• Sense of humor
• The bot intelligence/understanding to avoid getting frustrated when I don’t get the expected result

However, I chat again frequently if I find them useful for my day-to-day work. The two chatbots below are living on Facebook Messenger and want to facilitate users’ routine by summarising or double checking information that is on the red.

This is what I learned after teaching on chatbots and journalism: 3 takeaways for newsrooms

For the past year, I’ve been invited to share some ideas on how bots can help newsrooms to deliver news and how to build an engaging chatbot experiences. And throughout these classes, I’ve also had challenging questions on how these technologies are pushing the boundaries of ethics, artificial intelligence and storytelling.

Below 3 takeaways for newsrooms that want to begin this chatbots journey.

Kimchi, an experimental podcast bot on Facebook Messenger from AJ Innovation

After The Guardian launched Sous-Chef, an experimental Facebook Messenger chatbot that delivers recipes, other media companies have join the bandwagon.

In the middle of this chatbot revolution, Al Jazeera launched Kimchi, a Facebook Messenger chatbot that allows users to discover, share and play podcasts:

Tawanda Kanhema, from Al Jazeera’s Innovation Department, explains that Kimchi is an experimental project to gather insights and data on consumer behaviour on the podcast atmosphere (inside and outside Facebook).

Kimchi has been able to deliver 480 episodes and 500 podcast to a few thousand of users that have interacted since AJ launched the bot in March.

There are several apps that help users on the discovery phase for podcasts, such as Pocket Casts or NPR. So, why is Kimchi different?

Kanhema defines Kimchi as a personal podcast assistant that allows users to easily find specific podcasts by typing keywords. Apart from subscribing to these podcasts or adding them to the queue, users can listen to these without leaving Facebook Messenger app.

As part of the machine learning that is lacking on 80% of the bots on several messaging apps, the more Kimchi is used, the more it is able to suggest personalised content.

However, Kimchi is just part of a “bigger project that will have a similar back-end to Alexa or Google Home”, says Kanhema. First step has been to gather feedback on what content are people looking for, how are they searching for this content, and when are they listening to it. Next step will be to focus on basic capabilities to build a “conversational UX audio product”.

We’ll have to stay tuned for future announcements.

Do you know more examples? Let me know in the comments or at @mcrosasb