O'Reilly Bots Podcast - O'Reilly Media Podcast
25 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 7 years ago - ★★★★★ - 6 ratingsExploring bots, conversational interfaces, AI, and messaging.
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Episodes
Jason Laska and Michael Akilian on using AI to schedule meetings
May 25, 2017 10:30 - 44 minutes - 42.9 MBThe O’Reilly Bots Podcast: The technical and social dynamics of solving scheduling problems. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I talk to Jason Laska and Michael Akilian of Clara Labs, creator of a virtual assistant—Clara—that schedules meetings and interacts in natural language through email. E-mail is, to me, a highly promising (and somewhat underrated) venue for bots. Messaging is growing quickly, but e-mail is still the standard way to communicate within b...
Chris Messina on Facebook as a utility
May 11, 2017 10:45 - 1 hour - 65 MBThe O’Reilly Bots Podcast: The social impact of Facebook. In this episode of the Bots Podcast, Chris Messina and I reflect on what Facebook has become, the role that it now plays in our lives, and what it all means for developers. We recorded this discussion shortly after attending Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference in San Jose. When it opened to users in 2004, Facebook’s essential value was exclusion—it was available at first only to Harvard students, then to students at a handful of top-...
Tom Hadfield on bots in the enterprise
April 13, 2017 10:20 - 36 minutes - 34.9 MBMessaging as the operating system for the enterprise. In this episode of the Bots Podcast, we peer into the giant companies that are beginning to adopt messaging and bots. My guest is Tom Hadfield, founder of Message.io, a service that syndicates bots across many different messaging platforms. Hadfield argues that messaging and bots are the latest in a long evolution of communications technologies that have revolutionized the workplace—from the telegraph through e-mail—and that they are ab...
Prabhat on deep learning for science
April 03, 2017 11:10 - 26 minutes - 25.2 MBThe O’Reilly Bots Podcast: Solutions from big data sets. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, I talk about deep learning at the extremes of scale and computing power with Prabhat, who leads the data and analytics group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s supercomputing center. If you’re working on commercial AI, it’s worth glancing across the divide at scientific AI. Prabhat talks about his work at the the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), includ...
Tom Coates on conversational devices
March 09, 2017 12:35 - 51 minutes - 49.9 MBThe O’Reilly Bots Podcast: Conversational interfaces for the Internet of Things. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, I speak with Tom Coates, co-founder of Thington, a service layer for the Internet of Things. Thington provides a conversational, messaging-like interface for controlling devices like lights and thermostats, but it’s also conversational at a deeper level: its very architecture treats the interactions between different devices like a conversation, allowing devices to ...
Tim Hwang on bots that cause chaos
February 24, 2017 12:50 - 41 minutes - 40.3 MBThe O’Reilly Bots Podcast: Automating “psyops” with AI-driven bots. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, I speak with Tim Hwang, an affiliated researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, about AI-driven psyops bots and their capacity for social destabilization. Until recently, the psychological operations (psyops) conducted by governments and political organizations were mostly analog: dropping leaflets from airplanes, blasting radio messages across frontiers, planting stories wi...
Amir Shevat on workplace communication
February 16, 2017 12:20 - 49 minutes - 47.1 MBThe O’Reilly Bots Podcast: Slack’s head of developer relations talks about what bots can bring to Slack channels. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I speak with Amir Shevat, head of developer relations at Slack and the author of the forthcoming O’Reilly book Designing Bots: Creating Conversational Experiences. We often talk about consumer bots on the podcast, but workplace bots are arguably a more attractive market for the time being. Companies are able to dr...
Chris Messina on conversational commerce
January 26, 2017 13:10 - 53 minutes - 51.8 MBThe O’Reilly Bots Podcast: The 2017 bot outlook with one of the field’s early adopters. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I speak with Chris Messina, bot evangelist, creator of the hashtag, and, until recently, developer experience lead at Uber. We talk about the origins of MessinaBot, ruminate on the need for bots that truly exploit their medium rather than imitating older apps, and take a look at what’s ahead for bots in 2017. Discussion points: Traditiona...
Brad Abrams on Google Assistant
January 12, 2017 12:15 - 46 minutes - 44.8 MBThe O’Reilly Bots Podcast: A universal bot for messaging, mobile voice, and the home. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I speak with Brad Abrams, group product manager of Google Assistant, the company’s new AI-driven bot that lives in many different contexts, including the Pixel phone, the Allo messaging app, and the Google Home voice-controlled speaker. Discussion points: “Actions,” Google’s API for Assistant plug-ins. These are available for Google Home no...
2016 Bots year in review
December 29, 2016 13:10 - 51 minutes - 49.5 MBThe O’Reilly Bots Podcast: Recapping a revolutionary year in AI and bots, and looking ahead to 2017. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I look back at 2016, a big year for bots that saw important developments in platforms, tools, and underlying AI. We recap some of the biggest bot-related stories of 2016, including: People want to use messaging interfaces! Facebook Messenger, Kik, Slack, and Microsoft all made it easier for developers to create bots The fie...
Dennis Mortensen on email bots
December 15, 2016 15:20 - 53 minutes - 51.2 MBThe O’Reilly Bots Podcast: X.ai founder on personal assistant agents that schedule your meetings. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, I speak with Dennis Mortensen, founder and CEO of x.ai, a personal assistant bot that handles meeting scheduling through email. Discussion points: Social considerations for personal assistants and the bots that stand in for them x.ai users can call their virtual assistant either “Amy” or “Andrew.” Mortensen says users overwhelmingly choose the n...
Richard Socher on the future of deep learning
December 01, 2016 13:00 - 57 minutes - 55.5 MBThe O’Reilly Bots Podcast: Making neural networks more accessible. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I talk with Richard Socher, chief scientist at Salesforce. He was previously the founder and CEO of MetaMind, a deep learning startup that Salesforce acquired in 2016. Socher also teaches the “Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing” course at Stanford University. Our conversation focuses on where deep learning and NLP are headed, and interesting curren...
Ben Brown on bot tools
November 17, 2016 18:10 - 1 hour - 57.8 MBThe O’Reilly Bots Podcast: An optimistic look at the future of bots. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I speak with Ben Brown, co-founder and CEO of Howdy.ai, the bot toolmaker behind the Botkit framework. Brown also runs the Talkabot conference, which was held in Austin this past September. Discussion points: The types of bots that people are building and experimenting with on Botkit How the evolution of bots compares to the evolution of mobile apps The ...
Andrew Therriault on how data is transforming political campaigns
November 03, 2016 11:10 - 33 minutes - 32 MBThe O’Reilly Bots Podcast: Using data science to allocate campaign resources. The problem confronting a modern campaign manager is similar to the problem that any marketer encounters: how to spend finite resources to reach the right people and convince them to act. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, I talk data strategy with Andrew Therriault, chief data officer for the City of Boston. He was previously director of data science for the Democratic National Committee and is the edi...
Shivon Zilis on the machine intelligence landscape, and Bot Day wrap-up
October 27, 2016 11:25 - 1 hour - 62.1 MBThe O’Reilly Bots Podcast: Bots are the new web. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I recap O’Reilly Bot Day, held October 19, 2016, in San Francisco. The event gave us a good picture of what the bot community—and bot landscape—looks like, and the diverse group of attendees conveyed a strong sense of optimism about bots. Slides from Bot Day presentations are available here. We then speak with Shivon Zilis, partner at Bloomberg Beta, who has written extensively...
Michael Schneider, Rachel Law, and Alyx Baldwin on customer service with bots
October 20, 2016 13:55 - 56 minutes - 54.6 MBThe O’Reilly Bots Podcast: How bots are transforming the way companies interact with their customers. Customer service is a key application for bots—one of the first that we think of when we imagine a world full of AI-enabled conversational interfaces. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I talk with the founders of two companies that have developed bots to help consumers and companies talk to each other. We begin by hearing from Michael Schneider, founder and C...
Jassim Latif on workplace bots
October 13, 2016 15:55 - 50 minutes - 48.4 MBThe O’Reilly Bots Podcast: Bots that can respond to groups of users. The workplace is a rich venue for bots that help with productivity and collaboration. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I focus on workplace bots. We begin by talking with Jassim Latif, head of partnerships at Slack, about bots written by outside developers for scheduling, organizing meetings, and managing human resources. “We’re building toward a future where the value of these apps and serv...
Real AI products arrive
October 06, 2016 13:20 - 32 minutes - 31.1 MBThe O’Reilly Bots Podcast: Hilary Mason, Jimi Smoot, and Roger Chen on what AI means now. Something remarkable is happening in the world of artificial intelligence. At the O’Reilly AI Conference in New York, people weren’t just talking about AI as a far-off dream; they were talking about AI as something that exists in real products today. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots podcast, I talk with three artificial-intelligence practitioners about the real practice of AI: Hilary Mason, Jimi S...
Lili Cheng on bot personalities
September 29, 2016 10:15 - 55 minutes - 53.5 MBThe O’Reilly Bots Podcast: Group interaction through social computing. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I speak with Lili Cheng, general manager of FUSE Labs at Microsoft Research. Cheng’s team is responsible for the Microsoft Bot Framework. She’s also a speaker at O’Reilly’s upcoming Bot Day on October 19, 2016, in San Francisco. Cheng talks about Microsoft’s experimental bots and their goal of making conversations playful and engaging. We also discuss the ...
Andy Mauro on bot platforms and tools
September 22, 2016 11:15 - 1 hour - 70.7 MBThe O’Reilly Bots Podcast: A look at some of the technologies behind the chatbot boom. In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I speak with Andy Mauro, co-founder and CEO of Automat, a startup whose tools make it easy to build AI-powered bots. (Disclosure: Automat is a portfolio company of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, a VC firm affiliated with O’Reilly Media.) Mauro will be speaking at O’Reilly Bot Day on October 19, 2016, in San Francisco. “Anyone looking to get i...
Joshua Browder on bots that fight bureaucracy
September 15, 2016 11:20 - 42 minutes - 41 MBThe 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 appeal...
Cathy Pearl on voice user interfaces for bots
September 08, 2016 12:50 - 57 minutes - 55.3 MBThe 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 c...
Dennis Yang on bot analytics
September 01, 2016 10:45 - 1 hour - 72.2 MBThe 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...
Sarah Guo on the case for bots
August 25, 2016 17:20 - 58 minutes - 55.8 MBThe 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 ...
What are bots? Here’s the background.
August 18, 2016 13:20 - 44 minutes - 42.7 MBO’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 r...