16 AI bots with human names
We all know Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and Watson, but did you know that giving AI / bot software a human name is a growing trend? I attempt to list a few here. If you know of others, let me know.
Jessie is a SFO hipster Facebook messenger bot looking for a job, an apartment, and sipping lattes.
Ross is IBM’s legal advice AI. “ROSS returns precise answers to specific legal questions, along with a citation, just like a human researcher would. It also includes its level of confidence in its answer. For now, it is focused on questions about Canadian law, but CEO Andrew Arruda says he plans for ROSS to digest the law around the world.”
Kensho is a financial analyst. “‘People always tell me, ‘I used to spend two out of five days a week doing this sort of thing,’ or ‘I used to have a guy whose job it was to do nothing other than this one thing,’ ’’
Ernest is a UK Facebook messenger bank aggregator. You link your bank account to it and it proactively updates you on things it thinks are important. Its vision is to take the stress out of money management.
Zo is Microsoft’s replacement to Tay.
Amy and Andrew Ingram: x.ai’s calendar bots.
Baxter: programmable through gestures, this is an industrial robot with finesse. This video shows it folding a shirt. But of course, if you want shirt folding, you probably want something like the Foldimate.
Jibo: animated home bot, competing with Google Home and Alexa. Crowd-funded, announced in 2014, still yet to ship (Apr 2017)
Buddy: another crowd-funded bot similar to Jibo. Also pre-launch as of April 2017. Buddy is mobile, a step above Jibo which appears to be fixed.
This one is probably cheating: a human name to the NAO bot. Hilton’s Connie hotel robot. The actual robot is a $US8000 Softbank NAO robot, also used in Robocup soccer. Connie is pretty basic: it greets guests, answers questions about amenities and hours of operation. Given Pepper is also made by Softbank, there’s a good chance Connie will be upgraded into a Pepper skin sometime soon.
Humanoids
These make more sense having human names because their interface is a humanoid shape.
Amelia: customer support bot that has episodic memory: knows about past activities and attempts to empathise / adjust facial expressions in line with level of satisfaction See demo here and a technical overview here. The intonations are, by 2017 standards, behind the curve. Also the muscle movements around the mouth are just plain creepy.
Sophia: advanced facial gestures. As far as I can tell, the video is a script, unless someone tells me otherwise.
Erica: one of Japan’s most animated robots.
Mabu (“may-boo”): a medicinal robot.
Pepper: cute social bot.
Luna: as far as I can tell, this is still vaporware. But presents a story that it aggregates a number of AI-as-a-cloud services to answer any question very well. We’ll see.
