Microsoft's new subservient Skype bots fetch information in seconds

sincity · April 7, 2016

http://cdn.mos.techradar.com/art/software/Microsoft/Project%20Murphy-470-75.jpg

You may have noticed Microsoft making a big song and dance about AI bots at its Build conference last week. The company has now introduced a few of them to Skype, with two further offerings now being brought to the messaging service.

So what do the new Skype bots, which are called Murphy and Summarize, actually do? Murphy (based on Redmond's Project Murphy) is designed to respond to 'what if' questions and is powered by Microsoft Cognitive Services. It draws from knowledge services including Bing, and attempts to respond to these queries as relevantly as possible.

The twist is the answer will come in the form of one or several images, if the right question is asked, and the idea is that Murphy will become smarter as more people use the bot (as with all machine learning projects).

Summary execution

Summarize, on the other hand, is of more practical use and pretty much does what it says on the tin: you chuck the link for a web page at the bot, and it summarises the page, condensing the text down to three paragraphs to make it more easily digestible.

That could be pretty handy for those in a rush.

As we saw last week, Redmond has big plans for bots which are designed to help run our lives more smoothly, with the company keen to point out that these AI entities will be built with trustworthiness and respectfulness firmly in mind.

And hopefully they'll be better guarded against the prospect of their user base attempting to warp them, as recently happened with the denizens of Twitter and Microsoft's hapless Tay bot.

Via: WinBeta