Microsoft is sticking with bots at Build
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared that “bots are the new apps" at the Microsoft Build developer conference in March 2016.
Little over a year later, at the latest annual Build taking place this week in Seattle, Microsoft renewed its commitment to bots, leveraging advances in artificial intelligence and built around Nadella’s vision of conversation as a platform.
Chat bots are meant to model human conversation, some for social reasons, others for business and productivity purposes.
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Microsoft announced an expanded set of developer tools for the Bot Framework that was unveiled last year, announcing channels at Build that will let developers make use of bots through the Cortana personal assistant, Bing search engine and Skype for Business. Microsoft is also providing tools to make it simpler for merchants to let consumers pay for stuff through bots.
And Microsoft added new so-called “adaptive cards” to help developers spread bots across multiple apps and platforms, including Bing, Skype, Cortana and Microsoft Teams, as well as on iOS or Android.
In a brief onstage demo, Microsoft showed how a consumer would be able to ask if a restaurant has veggie dishes, without digging through apps or web pages.
More than 130,000 developers have registered to build with the Bot Framework since its release last year. “In a few years, it will be hard to imagine any technology that doesn’t tap into the power of AI,” said Harry Shum, Microsoft executive vice president for the AI (artificial intelligence) and research group.
Bots have had something of a shaky start. Holger Mueller, principal analyst at Constellation Research, says that “in general, chatbot uptake has been slow across the industry. While frameworks exist, there is uncertainty about popular platforms.”
Facebook has grappled with the tepid roll out of chat bots even as it is doubling down on the concept—many nascent chatbots have been buggy or aggravating.
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Microsoft has experienced its own problems, the most visible of which surrounded Tay.ai, a youth-oriented bot that was quickly pulled from the market last year, after it spewed racist and anti-Semitic comments.
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Microsoft quietly announced a replacement of sorts in the U.S. called Zo this past fall, now available on Kik and Facebook Messenger. Zo has attracted nearly 300,000 users, and has an average of 15 conversation “turns” per session.
Commenting on the aftermath of the Tay fiasco, Lili Cheng, who manages the FUSELabs for Microsoft Research, says “that shows how committed we are to the space. From Satya all the way down, people were like, `all right, let’s keep at it. Let’s go make that better and learn. We have a lot to do.”
Microsoft has seen successes abroad, notably with the Xiaoice chatbot in China (40 million users; 23 conversation turns) and the Rinna bot in Japan (30 million users; 21 conversation turns).
“We want to unpeel some of the complexity that people see and try to get back to something a lot more simple and human,” Cheng says.
Microsoft recently teamed up with Harman Kardon on an Amazon Echo-like speaker called Invoke, built around Cortana. At Build, Microsoft announced two new partners who plan to build Cortana-enabled devices, HP and Intel. Shum encouraged developers to use the Bot Framework to develop new “skills” for Cortana in such devices.
“We are infusing AI into every product and service we offer, from Xbox to Windows, from Bing to Office,” Shum says. “AI is going to disrupt every single business app.”
How big a role bots may play in that disruption is something the bots themselves could eventually answer.
Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter