Despite a history of making irksome digital assistants, Microsoft thinks you want to converse with your computer.
If you’d inadvertently unleashed a Neo-Nazi sexbot
on an unsuspecting Internet, you might be reluctant to proclaim the
technology as the future of computing. Microsoft, it seems, has no such
qualms.
Just a few days after yanking the errant chatbot Tay from
the Internet, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, announced that he expects
similar (though presumably less offensive) bots to become a commonplace.
In fact, Microsoft seems to believe that “conversational computing”
could be a major new paradigm in computing.
“We want to take the power of human language and apply it
more pervasively to all of the computing interface and the computing
interactions,” Nadella said during his keynote at the company’s Build 2016 conference for developers.
Nadella also acknowledged the Tay debacle, though. “We want
to build technology such that it gets the best of humanity, not the
worst,” he said a little awkwardly. “Just last week when we launched
Tay, which is a social bot, in the United States, we quickly realized it
was not up to this mark, and so we’re back to the drawing board.”
It’s a risky bet, and not just because, as Tay shows,
conversational bots are prone to annoying errors. Microsoft also has a
history of foisting irksome digital assistants on its users, and people
still complain bitterly about the company’s well-meaning yet idiotic
Windows assistant Clippy.
Even so, as one artificial intelligence expert pointed out
to me, the Tay episode might not be such a bad thing for Microsoft. The
real danger for the company these days may be seeming irrelevant
compared to competitors like Google and Facebook. Anything that makes
the company seem technologically adventurous, even edgy, can’t be bad.
Unless, that is, the company hasn’t learned anything from Clippy and Tay.
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