O'reilly Bots Podcast - O'reilly Media Podcast

The O’Reilly Bots Podcast: Can bots replace lawyers?In episode five of the O’Reilly Bots podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I speak with Joshua Browder, the 19-year old founder and CEO of DoNotPay, a series of bots that help people with legal issues, including challenging parking tickets, challenging bank charges, and claiming government assistance for homelessness. Dubbed “the world’s first robot lawyer,” his bots have attracted 260,000 users and provided 175,000 successful parking-ticket appeals.Browder will also be a featured speaker at O’Reilly Bot Day on October 19, 2016, in San Francisco. We discuss what happens when someone files a challenge through DoNotPay: the bot asks jurisdiction-based questions about the user’s specific circumstances, then goes through a decision tree to find the best possible defense, after which it creates a personalized challenge letter. We also cover the potential of these bots as replacements for lawyers; in fact, Browder is developing a legal platform that other

The O’Reilly Bots Podcast: Applying the principles of normal human interaction to chatbots.In episode four of the O’Reilly Bots podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I speak with Cathy Pearl, director of user experience at Sensely, and author of the forthcoming O’Reilly book “Designing Voice User Interfaces.” She’s also a speaker at O’Reilly’s upcoming Bot Day on October 19, 2016, in San Francisco.We begin with some differences between VUIs and conventional UIs. Pearl points out that “the key to conversational design is anticipating how people actually speak, not how we want them to speak.” The Amazon Echo, which we demonstrated in detail in episode 3, keeps coming up as a totally new mode of user interface; not only is it an exclusively voice-based interface with no built-in screen, but it’s also fundamentally social, intended for use in common spaces. Like Siri, the Echo has careful persona design, with subtle signals that help users figure out how to interact with it (as well as keeping them enter

The O’Reilly Bots Podcast: Measuring interactions between bots and humans.In episode three of the O’Reilly Bots podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I speak with Dennis Yang, co-founder and chief product officer of Dashbot, an analytics platform for bots. Bots are a new way for humans to interact with computers, and require new ways of thinking about measurement. We discuss crucial differences between bots and conventional interfaces, how human writers are essential for setting the right tone in a bot, and why users ask bots to tell them jokes.Links GameMonk, games for Slack that Yang has worked on Streak, a trivia game in Facebook Messenger Redfoo’s Messenger bot Bot of the Week Pete and I walk through the Amazon Echo’s most compelling features and test out a few third-party plugins: Secret Keeper, Uber, Iris, SMS with Molly, Password Generator, and, of course, 4AFart.

The O’Reilly Bots podcast: What a VC investor sees in chatbots.Greylock Partners investor Sarah Guo joins us for episode two of our new pop-up podcast on bots and conversational interfaces. She’s written insightfully on bots and has worked on several investments in bot startups.We open by asking how bots fit into Sarah’s investment thesis and why bot startups are appealing right now (short answer: they sit at the intersection between messaging, AI-based search, and mobile commerce). In the middle of the episode, we raise a question that comes up often in bot circles: is WeChat the future of mobile commerce? It’s easy to look at WeChat usage in China, where it’s an almost universal payment and identity platform, and see it as the final evolution of messaging, and a model that must eventually arrive in the U.S. Sarah thinks it’s not; in China, it preceded many of the Internet services that have already been popular in the U.S. for some time—payments, file transfer, common identity, and so on.

O’Reilly Bots Podcast: Why AI-driven chatbots are a big deal right now.We’re launching a new pop-up podcast about bots. In this first episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, I’m joined by Peter Skomoroch to talk background: why everyone is suddenly interested in bots and what they promise to do, and what sorts of applications are beginning to emerge.Bots have generated enormous interest in the last few months; Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has even called bots "the new apps." Bots (not the robot kind) are bits of software that use artificial intelligence to converse in human terms. As AI improves and the app ecosystem stagnates, they promise to create new, sophisticated, low-friction interfaces to all sorts of transactions. You can already call an Uber car by talking to Amazon's Echo, and you can send comments to Barack Obama through a Facebook Messenger bot. Any big organization that doesn't have a bot yet will probably have one soon. If you're interested