Marcus Endicott successfully predicts IBM Watson Salesforce partnership

IBM Watson announced partnership with Salesforce Einstein March 06, 2017.

Mar 06, 2017: IBM and Salesforce today announced a global strategic partnership to deliver joint solutions designed to leverage artificial intelligence and enable companies to make smarter decisions, faster than ever before. With the partnership, IBM Watson, the leading AI platform for business, and Salesforce Einstein, AI that powers the world’s #1 CRM, will seamlessly connect to enable an entirely new level of intelligent customer engagement across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more. IBM is also strategically investing in its Global Business Services capabilities for Salesforce with a new practice to help clients rapidly deploy the combined IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein capabilities.

Salesforce Einstein was launched in September 2016.

Sep 18, 2016: Salesforce forms research group, launches Einstein A.I. platform that works with Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud

For those still paying attention... I have been going on and on about this needing to happen for the past three years, on Quora.

Sep 1, 2014: I don't know of another system that integrates more systems, more easily than Salesforce. My main critique of Salesforce is that it is too rigidly focused on conventional business process, and does not allow enough leeway for the Internet of Things, much less for experimental AI....

Nov 13, 2014: Bluemix appears to be an empowerment play to widen the base of developers to include those less proficient in pure coding, along the lines of Salesforce. That said, when Bluemix becomes as user-friendly as Salesforce, only then will I consider it fully baked.

Feb 24, 2015: There needs to be something along the lines of Salesforce that is not exclusively limited to conventional business processes, but something broad enough to include all the possibilities of experimental AI.

Dec 3, 201: I'm most interested in "Lego-ization", and the plug-and-play model, which to some degree would require as yet non-existent standards. Think "Integration Platform as a Service", something along the lines of Salesforce meets MATLAB, up to the challenges of experimental AI of all kinds.

Aug 3, 2016: I want a *visual* middleware, along the lines of the highly modular Salesforce, but for experimental artificial intelligence instead of severely restricted to conventional business solutions.

Dissecting the Summarization Process

This is in effect a mid-2013 progress update. As with many of my blog posts, this is as much a status update for me to get a better handle on where I'm at as it is to broadcast my progress.

mendicott.com is a blog reflecting on my journey with the overall project. This blog started seven years ago, in 2006, with my inquiry into The difference between a web page and a blog.... I had then returned from something like five years of world travel to find the digerati fawning over the blogosphere. At first, I failed to see the difference between a blog and a content management system (CMS) for stock standard web pages. Upon closer examination, I began to realize that the real difference lay in the XML syndication of blog feeds into the real-time web.

meta-guide.com is an attempt to blueprint, or tutorialize, the process. My original Meta Guide 1.0 development in ASP attempted to create automated, or robotic, web pages based on XML feeds from the real-time web. Meta Guide 2.0 development was based on similar feed bots, or Twitter bots, in an attempt to automate, or at least semi-automate, the rapid development of large knowledgebases from social media via knowledge silos. Basically, I use knowledge templates to automatically create the knowledge silos, or large knowledgebases. The knowledge templates are based on my own, proprietary "taxonomies", or more precisely faceted classifications, painstakingly developed over many years.

gaiapassage.com aims to be an automated, or semi-automated, summarization of the knowledge aggregated from social media by feed bots via the proprietary faceted classifications, or knowledge templates. Right now, I'm doing a semi-automated summarization process with Gaia Passage, which consists of automated research in the form of knowledge silos being "massaged" in different ways, but ultimately manually writing the summarization in natural language. This is allowing me to analyze and attempt to dissect the processes involved in order to gradually prototype automation. Summarization technologies, and in particular summarization APIs, are still in their infancy. Examples of currently available summarization technologies include automatedinsights.com and narrativescience.com. The overall field is often referred to as automatic summarization.

In the future, the Gaia Passage human readable summarizations will need to be converted into machine readable dialog system knowledgebase format. The dialog system is basically a chatbot, or conversational user interface (CUI) into a specialized database, called a knowledgebase. Most, common chatbot knowledgebases are based on, or compatible with, XML, such as AIML for example. Voice technologies, both output and input, are generally an additional layer on top of the text based dialog system.

The two main bottlenecks I've come up against are what I like to call artificial intelligence middleware, or frameworks, the "glue" to integrate the various processes, as well as adequate dialog system tools, in particular chatbot knowledgebase tools with both "frontend" and "backend" APIs (application programming interface), in other words a dialog system API on the frontend with a backend API into the knowledgebase for dynamic modification. My favorite cloud based "middleware" is Yahoo! Pipes, which is generally referred to as a mashup platform (aka mashup enabler) for feed based data; however, there are severe performance issues with Yahoo! Pipes -- so, I don't really consider it to be a production ready tool. Like Yahoo! Pipes, my ideal visual, cloud based AI middleware could or should be language agnostic -- eliminating the need to decide on a single programming language for a project. I have also looked into scientific computing packages, such as LabVIEW, Mathematica, and MATLAB, for use as potential AI middleware. Additionally, there are a variety of both natural language and intelligent agent frameworks available. Business oriented cloud based integration, including visual cloud based middleware, is often referred to as iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service), integration PaaS or "Integration as a Service".

The recent closure of the previously open Twitter API with OAuth has set my feed bot, or "smart feed", development back by years. Right now, I'm stuck trying to figure out the best way to use the new Twitter OAuth with Yahoo! Pipes, for instance via YQL, if at all. And if that were not enough, the affordable and user-friendly dialog system API, verbotsonline.com, that I was using went out of business. There are a number of dialog system API alternatives, even cloud based dialog systems, but they are neither free nor cheap, especially for significant throughput volumes. Still to do: 1) complete the Gaia Passage summarizations, 2) make Twitter OAuth work, use a commercial third party data source (such as datasift.com, gnip.com or topsy.com), or abandon Twitter as a primary source (for instance concentrate on other social media APIs instead, such as Facebook), 3) continue the search for a new and better dialog system API provider.

Most basically, the Gaia Passage project is a network of robots that will not only monitor social media buzz about both the environment and tourism but also interpret the inter-relations, cause and effects, between environment and tourism -- such as how climate change effects the tourism industry both negatively or positively, or even what effects the weather has on crime trends for a particular destination -- as well as querying these interpreted inter-relations, or "conclusions", via natural language. If this can be accomplished with any degree of satisfaction, either fully automated or semi-automated, then the system could just as easily be applied to any other vertical. Proposals from potential sponsors, investors, or technology partners are welcomed, and may be sent to mendicot [at] yahoo.com.

My Chatbot FAQ

The following is a listing of the questions I have answered on Yahoo! Answers about chatbots over the past year, as a result of building http://twitter.com/yanswersbot ... a Twitter bot performing a persistent search for bots and robots, basically alerting me to new questions. Click on the questions for more detail, as well as for other answers. Blame the slight redundancy on "frequently asked questions".... [Note that the questions themselves are messy, which is something that any question answering system must deal with.]

(24) "Are there anygood ACTIVE Msn chat bots?"

=> http://www.chatbots.org/developer/msn/

(23) "2 Computing questions about Chatbots and Turing test?"

1) One of the best places to start is the Wikipedia entry for "Chatterbot" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatterbot .. (At this point I consider "Chatterbot" to be a derogatory term for currently more sophisticated "chatbots"; certainly earlier examples didn't do much more than "chatter", but today chatbots are much more interactive and responsive..)

2) Today, the hot topic is #IBMWatson, see Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Watson .. There is a good article about #IBMWatson , "Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project", AI Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 3. (2010), by D. Ferrucci, E. Brown, J. Chu-Carroll, et al. You can find Stephen Baker at http://twitter.com/SBFinalJeopardy , author of the upcoming "updateable e-book" about #IBMWatson , "Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything" http://tinyurl.com/2vmsvvu ..

(22) "Help me find a story about a chat bot?"

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boten_Anna

This is not the story you are looking for, but something similar ..

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_and_the_Real_Girl

This is also not the story you are looking for, but something related ..

(21) "how do i make a chat bot?"

It appears that Mibbit does both IRC and XMPP.. There are many IRC and XMPP chatbots available.. Just try googling "IRC chat-bot" or "XMPP chat-bot"..

Source(s): http://www.imified.com/

(20) "Can anyone give me any GOOD information on how to make an advanced chatbot?"

Follow my Twitter stream at http://twitter.com/mendicott for new chatbot tools ..

Source(s): http://www.scribd.com/search?q=chatbot

(19) "Does Anyone know ov a Free Safe and blank chatterbot I can download?"

Try http://www.verbots.com ..

(18) "How do you think cleverbot works?"

Cleverbot uses string metrics, a technique called "string similarity"..

Cleverbot creator, Rollo Carpenter, discusses his work in a series of videos entitled "Learning Creating Phrasing" => http://tinyurl.com/28zvgeb ..

Source(s): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_metrics .. http://science.discovery.com/videos/popscis-future-of-cleverbot.html

(17) "i want to create a chat bot.?"

You will need to clarify this more.

Currently, chatbots are text-in/text-out.

Various text-to-speech (TTS) technologies allow the text to be read out loud.

Windows7 speech tools allow you to input speech via automatic speech recognition (ASR).

(16) "What is the most intelligent chatterbot available for free online?"

Try http://www.cleverbot.com ..

[ Cleverbot is a more fuzzy variant of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwacky with deeper context .. ]

[ SmarterChild is dead .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmarterChild ]

(15) "how do chatbots know what to say?"

The Wikipedia "Chatterbot" article is probably the best pace to start..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatterbot

Most basically, chatbots use various forms of "pattern matching"..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_matching

(14) "Any Chat Bots you know for messenger?"

Try:

List of "Working MSN Chatbots" http://tinyurl.com/y3s6hmz

List of "MSN Chat Bots" http://msnemotions.org/msn-chat-bots.html

Chatbots On MSN Messenger, IM And Windows Live Messenger http://chatbots.org/platform/livemessenger/

(13) "WHY DON'T CHAT BOTS WORK ANYMORE?"

Try:

List of "Working MSN Chatbots" http://tinyurl.com/y3s6hmz

List of "MSN Chat Bots" http://msnemotions.org/msn-chat-bots.html

Chatbots On MSN Messenger, IM And Windows Live Messenger http://chatbots.org/platform/livemessenger/

(12) "ANY CHAT BOTS LIKE SMARTERCHILD THAT WORK???"

YouTube is a good place to find new chatbots http://youtube.com/results?search_query=chat-bot

(11) "Cleverbot and other AI systems?"

Probably the best place to start is http://chatbots.org ..

(10) "is there a chat bot like elbot or A.L.I.C.E that can generate messages in English that anyone can access?"

You can make your own ALICEbot with http://www.pandorabots.com/ ..

Conversive VerbotsOnline is a good alternative at http://www.verbotsonline.com/ ..

Personality Forge seems to be popular http://www.personalityforge.com/ ..

You could also try MyCyberTwin http://www.mycybertwin.com/ ..

(9) "SmarterChild or a different chat bot?"

You can read about the demise of SmarterChild at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmarterChild ..

Skype does not have many chatbots because its API is not open to the XMPP/Jabber standard..

Apple iChat is compatible with XMPP/Jabber, so should be able to access most common IM chatbots, for details see http://allforces.com/2005/05/06/ichat-to-msn-through-jabber/ ..

(8) "What are some up to date chat bots for MSN Live Messenger?"

Try this relatively recent list of 124 MSN chatbots at http://www.chatbots.org/platform/livemessenger (If you find dead ones in that list, please leave comments there to that effect ..)

(7) "How i can promote a msn chat bot?"

Simply tweet about it on Twitter .. or better .. make it talk to Twitter with something like http://www.tweet.im or http://www.imified.com .. and then tweet about that ..

Source(s): http://www.squidoo.com/twuring

(6) "whats this chat system called?"

http://www.cleverbot.com/

(5) "what is the website for chatterbot?"

There are a number of "chatterbot" directories online, try:

http://www.aidreams.co.uk/chatterbotcollection/

or

http://www.chatbots.org/

Popular "chatterbots" you can try are:

http://www.cleverbot.com/

or

http://www.alicebot.org/igod/

(4) "why was the spleak chat bot deleted?"

There used to be an informative article about the history of Spleak on Wikipedia, but it seems to have become degraded..

Basically, the company went out of business..

See this link to the Webarchive copy of the last Spleak blog entry, January 2008 => http://tinyurl.com/nqlch4

(3) "how to create twitter bot?"

Try http://www.botomatic.com/ or http://www.tweetbots.com/ ..

There are many PHP Twitter bots available ..

Don't spam! :-(

(2) "where can i get free chatbots from for my chatroom?"

It depends on what kind of "chatroom" you have; but, the "8pla.net forum bot AI (Artificial Intelligence)" at http://www.8pla.net/ is a good place to start.

(1) "Did exist chat bot which can be download on computer?"

Try downloading the new Verbot 5 application from =>; http://www.verbots.com/ .

Books, metadata and chatbots… in search of the XML Rosetta Stone

I am an author and I build chatbots (aka chatterbots). A chatbot is a conversational agent, driven by a knowledgebase. I am currently trying to understand the best way to convert a book into a chatbot knowledgebase.

A knowledgebase is a form of database, and the chatbot is actually a type of search… an anthropomorphic form of search and therefore an ergonomic form of search. This simple fact is usually shrouded by the jargon of “natural language processing”, which may or may not be actual voice input or output.

According to the ruling precepts of the “Turing test”, chatbots must be as close as possible to conversational, and this is what differentiates them from pure “search”…. With chatbots there is a significant element of “smoke and mirrors” involved, which introduces the human psychological element into the machine in the form of cultural, linguistic and thematic assumptions and expectations, so becoming in a sense a sort of “mind game”.

I’m actually approaching this from two directions. I would also like to be able to feed RSS into a chatbot knowledgebase. There is currently no working example of this available. Parsing RSS into AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), the most common chatbot dialect, is problematic and yet to be cracked effectively. So, my thinking arrived at somehow breaking a book into a form that resembles RSS. The Wikipedia List of XML markup languages revealed a number of attempts to add metadata to books.

Dr. Wallace, the originator of AIML, recently responded on the pandorabots-general group, that using RSS title fields would usually be too specific to make them useful as chatbot concept triggers. However, I believe utilities such as the Yahoo! Term Extraction API could be used to create tags for feed items, which might then prove more useful when mapped to AIML patterns….

My supposition is that a *good* book index is in effect a “taxonomy” of that book. Paragraphs would generally be too large to meet the specialized “conversational” needs of a chatbot. The results of a conventional concordance would be too general to be useful in a chatbot…. If RSS as we know it is currently too specific to function effectively in a chatbot, what if that index were mapped back to the referring sentences as “tags”, somewhat like RSS?

I figure that if you can relatively quickly break a book down into a sentence “concordance”, you could then point that at something like the Yahoo! Term Extraction API to quickly generate relevant keywords (or “tags”) for each sentence, which could then be used in AIML as triggers for those sentences in a chatbot…. Is there such a beast as a “sentence parser” for a corpus such as a common book? All I want to do at this point is strip out all the sentences and line them up, as a conventional concordance does with individual words.

There are a number of examples of desktop chatbots using proprietary Windows speech recognition today, however to my knowledge there are currently no chatbots available online or via VoIP that accept voice input (*not* IM or IRC bots)…. So, I’ve also spent some time lately looking into voiceXML (VXML), ccXML and the Voxeo callXML, as well as the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) and the mythical voice browser…. The only thing I could find that actually accepts voice input online for processing is Midomi.com, which accepts voice input in the form of hummed tune for tune recognition…. Apparently goog411, which is basically interactive voice response (IVR) rather than true speech recognition, is as close as it gets to a practical hybrid online/offline voice search application at this time. So, what if Google could talk?

AIML <-> OWL ??

Since I posted my original query to the pandorabots-general list in July, I'm beginning to understand the concepts involved a little better, thanks also to replies from this group and others, such as the protege-owl list.

In a comment to my recent blog entry ("I'm dreaming of RSS in => AIML out"), Jean-Claude Morand has mentioned that RSS 1.0 would probably be more conducive to conversion into RDF or AIML than RSS 2.0. He also mentioned that the Dublin Core metadata standard may eventually overtake RSS in primacy....

So, can XSL transforms really be used to translate between RSS and RDF, and between RDF and AIML?? My understanding at this point is that talking about AIML and OWL is a bit like apples and oranges.... Apparently the output from an OWL Reasoner would be in RDF? I have by now discovered the Robitron group and am finding that archive to be a rich resource....

What does this have to do with Pandorabots? I would like to address a brief question, in particular to Dr. Wallace... what do you see as the impediments to upgrading the Pandorabots service to include an OWL Reasoner (or in chaining it to another service that would provide the same function)? Surely you've considered this.... Where are the bottlenecks (other than time and money of course)? Is it an unreasonable expectation to be able to upload OWL ontologies much the same as we can upload AIML knowledgebases today?

As I have mentioned previously, one of my interests is creating knowledgebases on the fly using taxonomies. My belief is that quick and dirty knowledgebases are a more productive focus than pouring time and energy into trying to meet the requirements of the Turing test (another rant for another day....) Certainly with chatbots there is a substantial element of smoke and mirrors involved in any case.... One can always go back and refine as needed based on actual chat logs.

The next step for me will be to try and convert my most recent book, VAGABOND GLOBETROTTING 3, into a VagaBot.... I would like to hear from anyone with experience in converting books into AIML knowledgebases! My supposition is that a *good* book index is in effect a "taxonomy" of that book.... My guess is that I can use the index entries as patterns, and their referring sections as templates... to create at least the core of a knowledgebase. If more detail is needed then a concordance can always be applied to the book.

After that I hope to tackle creating quick and dirty AIML knowledgebases on the fly from RSS feed title and description fields... not in pursuit of the chimera of the Turing test, but simply to build a better bot. (Now, I wonder if anyone has ever created RSS from a book?!? ;^))

I'm dreaming of RSS in => AIML out

I am still trying to get my head around the relationship between chatbots and the Semantic Web, or Web 3.0.... Any thoughts or comments on the precise nature of this relationship are welcome.

Converting from VKB back into AIML was my first crash course in working with XML dialects.... Since then the old lightbulb has gone off, or rather "on" I should say, and it suddenly dawned on me that the whole hullabaloo about Web 2.0 largely centers on the exchange of metadata, most often in the form of RSS, another XML dialect.

I was really stoked to learn of the work of Eric Freese, apparently processing logic using the Jena framework then manually(?) converting that RDF into AIML; however, I continue to wait for word of his "Semetag/AIMEE" example at http://www.semetag.com .

My understanding is that it is quite do-able, as in off the shelf, to pull RSS into a database and accumulate it there.... Could such a database of RSS not be used as a potential knowledgebase for a chatbot?

The missing element seems to be the processing, or DL Reasoner(?).... I have been unable to find any reference to such a web-based, modular DL Reasoner yet....

http://www.knoodl.com seems to be the closest thing to a "Web 2.0-style" collaborative ontology editor, which is fine for creating ontologies collectively, however falls short of meeting the processing requirement.

In short, I'm dreaming of RSS in => AIML out. At this point I would be happy with a "toy" or abbreviated system just to begin playing around with all this affordably (not least time-wise). So it seems what's still needed is a simple, plug and play "Web 2.0-style" (or is that "Web 3.0" style?) web-based DL Reasoner that accepts common OWL ontologies, then automagically goes from RDF into AIML....

Marcus Endicott's Second Life Travel Guide

Lately, I've been working on porting my ByronBot (http://www.mendicott.com/byronbay/) over to the currently popular Second Life (http://www.mendicott.com/secondlife/) 3D virtual world.

My ByronBot is built on the Verbots Online (http://www.verbotsonline.com/) platform.

Metaverse Technology (http://www.metaversetech.com/) has built a Second Life Chatbot product based on the Pandorabots (http://www.pandorabots.com/) platform.

Pandorabots is based on Artificial Intelligence Markup Language, rather than the proprietary Verbot KnowledgeBase files.

The Metaverse Technology S-Bot product combines the Second Life Linden Scripting Language with the Pandorabots AIML.

There is an open source AIML-Verbot Converter tool going from AIML to VKB, but not vice versa....

So, I've been using the recommended GaitoBot AIML editor to recreate the ByronBot KnowledgeBase in Pandorabots AIML.

You should be able to find my new Second Life ByronBot near Byron Bay @ 5 O'Clock Somewhere at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Plush%20Omega/101/21/22 .

Ideally, the Second Life ByronBot will emulate a tourist information officer, of for instance a DMO (Destination Marketing Organization), inside the 3D virtual world... providing information about Byron Bay, Northern New South Wales, Australia.