Microsoft wants you to love its bots
Satya Nadella believes he's found The Next Big Thing. The concept that will usher in a new era of computing. With his company at the vanguard, of course.
Nadella, the stylish and analytical CEO of Microsoft, is preaching the power of bots. And not just any bots -- bots powered by artificial intelligence that can carry meaningful conversations and handle tasks for you.
Yes, you. Don't run away.
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"It's about taking the power of human language and applying it more pervasively to all of our computing," Nadella said in his cerebral introduction to Microsoft's annual developers conference, which kicked off on Wednesday. "By doing so, we think this can have as profound an impact as the previous platform shifts have had, whether it be GUI [graphical user interface], or the web, or touch, or mobile."
There will be bots, he said. Bots for ordering you pizza and calling a cab and booking flight tickets and communicating with you on Skype.
Bots, bots, bots, bots, bots.
"People to people. People to your personal digital assistant. People to bots. Even people to your personal assistant calling on your bots on your behalf," Nadella said in a statement so bizarre even we couldn't have made it up. "That's the world you are going to see in years to come."
But it took more than an hour for Nadella to acknowledge the elephant bot in the room. Microsoft's wild child: Tay.
Just days before Microsoft's biggest event of the year, the company proudly announced Tay, a spunky, experimental AI-powered Twitter bot to chat up millennials. It could have shown off the power of bots to carry on entertaining conversations.
Instead, Tay turned into a foul-mouthed, Jew-hating Trump supporter in a matter of hours after being trolled by Twitter users and had to be suspended. On Wednesday, hours before Nadella took the stage, Microsoft accidentally re-activated Tay only to quickly pull it again after the bot started bragging about smoking weed.
"We want to build technology so that it gets the best of technology, not the worst," Nadella said on stage later. "Just last week, when we launched our incubation Tay... we quickly realized it was not up to this mark."
A short burst of laughter could be heard in the room full of developers, media and Microsoft employees. Nadella remained serious.
"So we are back to the drawing board."
In search of the next big thing
AI-powered chatbots are not new. You may have stumbled across one playing the role of virtual assistant or customer support in some corner of the Internet.
But the language and use cases of these bots, like artificial intelligence more broadly, tend to more limited. "How are you, chatbot?" "I am good. How are you?" "Um..."
"In their attempts to move out of their comfort zones and attempt to showcase the 'coolness' of their AI, companies often stumble," says Siddhartha Srinivasa, an associate professor at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon, who works with artificial intelligence in robots.
"It's like if Taylor Swift attempted the opera; it'd be cute and way better than most of us, but it would occasionally be ridiculous."
For Microsoft, this latest AI bot effort is part of an ongoing (some might say desperate) attempt to bulldoze past the smartphone era it lost out on to, well, something else. Anything.
You want a tablet that can fold and double as a laptop, or very expensive sketchpad? Check. You want some bulky $3,000 augmented reality goggles that somehow make it easier to do interior design and inspect brains? Check. You want to talk to some bots? Go for it, just please don't say anything too crazy. Guys? Guys???
While many of these bots may prove harmless -- there's only so much damage a bot for ordering pizza can do, after all -- Microsoft and Nadella appear committed to building truly conversational bots, PR risks be damned, all to find their way to the future.
The perils of building human-like bots
Microsoft is far from the only tech company experimenting with artificial intelligence. The phrase has become short-hand for "the future" in Silicon Valley.
Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple are all incorporating AI into tools ranging from personal assistants to personal assistants and even personal assistants.
Investor appetite for these services has ballooned as well, with AI startups raising more than $300 million last year, up from $45 million in 2010, according to data from CB Insights, a venture capital database.
These same companies have generally tried to stick within certain confines and to avoid over-promising.
Facebook's AI-powered personal assistant M, for example, relies on a mix of algorithms and actual people to answer queries with fairly plain language. Amazon's Echo and Apple's Siri incorporate pre-programmed jokes, but don't actually try to adopt the language of users in real-time.
Others are turning AI assistants loose for more targeted use cases: automatically scheduling appointments, shopping assistants and, sure, ordering pizza.
Because the technology just isn't there yet for a fully conversant AI bot like Tay pretended to be. And because Americans are apparently awful, at least according to Microsoft, which pointed out in a blog and on stage it has had similar bots in China and Japan operating without being trolled into hateful rhetoric.
"You can mimic human conversations and the idea of human understanding to a large degree. It looks like a real conversation," says Dennis Mortensen, CEO and founder of x.ai, a startup that has raised $11 million to building an AI personal assistant to schedule appointments. "This type of AI has very little understanding, to the point of no understanding at all of whats going on in this conversation. It is just extremely good at making connections between what you’re saying."
Mortensen's scheduling tool may not be as sexy as a witty millennial chatbot, but it's also unlikely to set up a PR firestorm.
"There is a communication VP at Microsoft right now sh*ting her pants," he said. "We're very confident we'll never end up in that corner."
tl;dr Microsoft: sometimes boring is better.
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Topics Microsoft
Seth Fiegerman was a Senior Business Reporter at Mashable, where he covered startups, marketing and the latest consumer tech trends. He joined Mashable in August 2012 and is based in New York.Before joining Mashable, Seth covered all things Apple as a reporter at Silicon Alley Insider, the tech section of Business Insider. He has also worked as a staff writer at TheStreet.com and as an editor at Playboy Magazine. His work has appeared in Newsweek, NPR, Kiplinger, Portfolio and The Huffington Post.Seth received his Bachelor of Arts from New York University, where he majored in journalism and philosophy.In his spare time, Seth enjoys bike riding around Brooklyn and writing really bad folk songs.
