Jon Bruner

Excellent idea and execution. Most companies use a tangle of antiquated services for managing internal knowledge and processes: between the wikis, ticketing systems, and intranet landing pages, employees are likely to revert to informal processes or give up entirely. SkipFlag is a completely modern solution: it gleans knowledge and process from organic conversations. The result is a service...

"Psyops" meet AI-driven bots. Tim is the co-author of this fascinating paper in which he reflects on the potential of bots to cause chaos, and outlines a few approaches that governments could take. http://politicalbots.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Comprop-Working-Paper-Hwang-and-Rosen.pdf

Listen to learn why Amir chose the Siberian Husky for the cover of his new O'Reilly book...

It was great to talk with Chris on the podcast. I've been thinking a lot about "bot skeuomorphism"—Pete's term for features that are just directly borrowed from web or mobile apps and stuffed into bots. That's the central point of our conversation in this episode: developers are just now coming up with models that are truly native to the bot medium, and those models (as well as the bot medium...

Pete and I enjoyed podcasting with Brad Abrams, who's the product manager for Google Assistant. The really interesting thing about Assistant is that it's a single meta-bot present in several different venues: as a native app on the Pixel phone, as the core functionality of the Google Home speaker, and as a messaging assistant inside Google Allo.

I still rely on e-mail for most interactions despite my interest in bots and messaging, so I'm especially intrigued by e-mail bots. X.ai is one of a handful of bots that can be invoked by cc'ing an e-mail address; the bot takes over and handles the usual back-and-forth of picking a convenient time to meet. It'll be interesting to see social conventions develop around these bots. There's a...

If you haven't looked at Kik bots yet, be sure to check this out. Andy is one of the leaders of the emerging bot world, and the stuff he's doing with influencer marketing is fascinating.

Richard is an authority on AI; he's got a PhD from Andrew Ng's group at Stanford and founded a cutting-edge AI startup that he sold to Salesforce. We really enjoyed talking with him about the future of deep learning. A lot of our discussion focuses on making neural networks more accessible—both making them easier for developers to implement, and making them more transparent and interpretable.

Pete and I really enjoyed talking with three very sharp people about their bots that help customers. The first conversation here is with Michael Schneider from Service, a bot with humans in the loop that intercedes in customer disputes. Our second conversation is with Alyx Baldwin and Rachel Law, founders of Kip, a bot that coordinates purchases within teams. Kip: http://kipthis.com/ Service:...

Pete and I talk with Jassim Latif, head of partnerships at Slack, about workplace bots and the promise (and challenge) of bots that can participate in group discussions. Then, we move on to the first public demo of Rover, Pete's new product from his startup SkipFlag. Finally, we talk about Allo, Google's new messaging application that includes an AI assistant. It's definitely still...