Have an ad network buy products on my behalf? No thanks.
M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger
31–40 of 175 posts
Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger
#32This seems like a move into the Chinese-style mega-app where you can do everything from one app - buy shoes, talk to your friends, figure out when the train departs. Facebook already has two top-50 apps, and creating new, unproven apps and promoting them to that point is expensive. So, to increase influence they are putting more into the existing apps.
Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have mixed feelings about this like I'm sure many do. Greater convenience, but less and less privacy.. Our Fb/goog/nsa overlords know what we eat, where we shit, all of our conversations and relationships. What a scary world we live in.
Not to mention, it's probably less useful. I am actually okay with the privacy I give up when using Google Now, for example, because being passively informed about things I'm getting shipped to my house, about traffic conditions to/from my house, etc. is nice. Giving up privacy seems justifiable in those instances. But FB suggesting restaurants, I just know that there will be money exchanging hands. FB being FB, will…
I'm totally fine with FB charging businesses for advertisement. It's a free market, they can choose not to advertise there. Not a terrible exchange imo. However, Yelp extorting businesses to pay them to remove bad ratings/give good ratings is pretty shitty.
It would be pretty cool to order in the chat, 'deliver me 10 burgers from this restaurant using doordash at 6pm'. I would rather not click through crappy websites/enter my cc every time.
However every time we do do that, our habits and conversations get written in stone (in multiple data sets being passed around and bought/sold everywhere).
Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger
#34I want Amazon to build a personal digital assistant, and then integrate it into filters. Today I was searching for socks, I care about 3 things, the size, the color, and whether they go up to the ankle or not. It seems like information they probably have (or a well trained net could figure out), so it would be nice if it was offered as a filter.
A few weeks ago I was trying to find toys for my son. I was most interested in "things for a 6 month old". They did have that filter, but it was 0 - 24 months. At this age a few months make a HUGE difference. I wish the box was a bit more fine grained.
Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger
#35“You have lots of AIs—like Siri, Google Now, or Cortana—whose scope is quite limited. Because AI is limited, you have to define a limited scope,” Lebrun says. “We wanted to start with something more ambitious, to really give people what they’re asking for.” This meant the team would need more than AI...Even after bringing neural nets into the mix, he says, the company will continue to use human trainers for years on end.
I can't help but picture a large, fluorescent-lit room of jolly old British "trainers" in safari khakis running around admonishing misbehaving AI for telling bad jokes, all the while trying to juggle placing calls to the DMV and restaurants to make reservations for 700 million messenger users.
Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger
#36Haha, it looks eerily similar to Myra, the cross platform assistant I launched last week [1]. Including the name. Interesting times.
Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger
#37This seems like a move into the Chinese-style mega-app where you can do everything from one app - buy shoes, talk to your friends, figure out when the train departs. Facebook already has two top-50 apps, and creating new, unproven apps and promoting them to that point is expensive. So, to increase influence they are putting more into the existing apps.
> Facebook already has two top-50 apps
I count 4: Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram.
Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger
#38Haha, it looks eerily similar to Myra, the cross platform assistant I launched last week [1]. Including the name. Interesting times. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10060074 .
Myra looks similar Magic to which was launched earlier this year. Also has a name beginning with m. http://www.wired.com/2015/03/stump-magic/
Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's Visual Studio logo.
The old one is a mobius strip. The new one is more angular and 1 color. https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/visual-studio-homepage-vs...
Even the old one isn't a proper mobius strip. In the transparent version[1] you can see that the strip twists behind the crossing making it a normal loop.
Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger
#40The first thing I see when someone asks "find me a good burger place in Chicago" is "how can companies game this through official ($) or artificial (spam) means?"
This is an advertising gold mine. It's hard to monetize a news feed because users are looking at pictures of their friends and don't want ads. Now you have a way for users to ask about buying stuff, and now you have a very easy way to match up those intents with ad supply.