And The Winner Is…Champion Hackathon Chatbots

The idea of chatbots has been around since the mid 1960s. ELIZA was the first of its kind, created in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Since then, though, there has been a proliferation of chatbots. When they first began to become more widespread and available to the general public, in the late 1990s, they mainly […]

How Changes in Consumer Behavior in the 2010s Has Shaped the Business World

“Today’s consumers are more enlightened and empowered than ever. And they are placing ever-greater demands on their retailers to either “get it right” or lose their business.”   – Kali Klena, IBM Global Retail Lead Today’s savvy consumers contrast sharply from yesterday’s shoppers. They are confident, industrious, and technologically astute, and expect businesses to exhibit […]

Language Families and NLP

Chatbots offer an opportunity to reach international audiences. The more languages one supports, the more customers it can reach. The variety of human languages makes this a challenge. If you’re reading this article, you’re presumably familiar with English and perhaps with some other European languages. Translating even between them can be difficult. When we consider […]

An Overview of the State of Robotics

As science fiction writers first conceived robots, they were humanoid machines that performed services in response to spoken directions. This is the idea of R.U.R. by Čapek (which introduced the word “robot” to the world), as well as Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot stories. What we now call robots have gone in quite a different direction. […]