Bot! zine - Issue #85

AI advances are turning problems previously thought to lie beyond the realm of what machines could tackle into commodities that are percolating into our everyday life.

For the past few months ZeroFOX, a social media-focused digital security company, has been looking into a massive pornography botnet targeting Twitter. Dubbed SIREN, after the mythical Greek creatures said to lure sailors to their deaths with song, the botnet campaign reportedly included around 90,000 accounts that produced over 8.5 million tweets.

As chatbots become more and more sophisticated, brands are increasingly relying on them as an easy (and inexpensive) way to provide customer assistance. Likewise, plenty of consumers are happy to skip the help line and get straight to the answer. But does that mean chatbots will totally replace live agents?

Now that chatbots are seeping into the mainstream, interaction designers are starting to receive briefs to design and improve chatbot conversational experiences on apps, websites, and more. 

That begs the question: What is interaction design for chatbots?

Ryan Compton (Head of Applied Machine Learning at Clarifai) shares how to create a visual artificial intelligent (AI) system that gives machines the ability to identify and classify images. Jeff Smith (Founder of John Done) demonstrates how to build intelligent support agents bots that can ask questions on your behalf whether to humans or IVR phone trees – no more call waiting or mind-numbing phone menus!