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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.

2016 Bots Year in Review

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.

Brad Abrams on Google Assistant

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."

Amir Shevat on Enterprise Workplace Communication

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 businesses and especially between businesses. E-mail conventions are somewhat standardized, and much of it is highly routinized—automatically generated reports, receipts, etc.—so it’s ripe for automation.

Laska, who leads the machine learning efforts at Clara Labs, and Akilian, the company’s co-founder and CTO, talk about the reality of developing an AI-driven product, and explain Clara’s human-in-the-loop system. “People are still there to do some of the most challenging aspects of this work, and that’s exactly what you want to use people for,” says Laska.

Jason Laska and Michael Akilian on Scheduling Bots

This week, I sit down with Cynthia Savard Saucier, director of design at Shopify and author of Tragic Design. Saucier also is keynoting at Velocity in New York, October 1-4, 2017. We talk about moving from working in design to leading designers, the real and sometimes negative impact that design decisions can have on users, and how design is organized at Shopify.

Cynthia Savard Saucier on Design at Shopify

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Geoffrey Bradway, VP of engineering at Numerai, a new hedge fund that relies on contributions of external data scientists. The company hosts regular competitions where data scientists submit machine learning models for classification tasks. The most promising submissions are then added to an ensemble of models that the company uses to trade in real-world financial markets.

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