The push to make a smart assistant that works great for users has been in full swing for a few years now. The three major smartphone OS makers all have their own versions, Windows Phone has Cortana, Android has Google Now and Apple has Siri. When Apple bought Siri it was believed that the company would make it into its next huge feature and while the company presented it that way, Siri has fallen on her face time and again. Recently Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield has some choice words when talking about Apple’s Siri.
“Apple spent billions of dollars on Siri and worked on it for a very long time with hundreds of engineers and a huge dataset of voices — and it’s f–ing idiotic. Siri is nearly useless,”
Butterfield’s messaging platform, Slack, is looking to upgrade their Slack messaging assistant SlackBot. The assistant is limited to living inside the Slack messaging system so right now you can only use it through the Slack app and desktop interface. Butterfield wants to expand on the idea of teams and messaging with SlackBot and go beyond its current prompting stage. Butterfield wants to make SlackBot able to recognize when a team is stuck on a problem and offer help automatically. Basically SlackBot would be looking over your shoulder all the time to be sure you’re on track. Butterfield wants to make SlackBot much like the AI character in the movie “Her” with Scarlett Johannson.
Like Samantha, who speaks to thousands of people at once throughout Spike Jonze’s film, Butterfield wants Slackbot to be able to access a company’s internal infrastructure and connect with everyone on a team simultaneously. Then, it would be able to access details of who is working on what project and who might be on holiday, for example. That information could be used to perform mundane tasks like schedule meetings.
Butterfield has some interesting ideas that could move the world of team communications in the right direction.
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[button link=”http://www.businessinsider.com.au/slack-ceo-apples-siri-useless-ai-virtual-assistant-slackbot-2015-8″ icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Business Insider[/button]Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
