A Better ChatGPT App? Poe wants to Build the Universal AI Messaging Client

A Better App?  Poe Logo,  More Coming, Quora

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE/TECH/APPS

A better ChatGPT app: Poe wants to build the universal AI messaging client

The chatbot explosion is coming — but building a great chat app is harder than it seems. Quora thinks a lot of developers might be looking for a simpler way.

By DAVID PIERCE   Apr 10, 2023   in TheVerge

Poe’s logo, a purple chatbot character.

Poe isn’t a chatbot — it’s an app for all your chatbots. Image: Poe

ChatGPT is a remarkable piece of technology and a really crappy consumer product. Load OpenAI’s revolutionary chatbot at any given time, and after a long wait, you’ll be greeted with… well, likely as not, a message saying ChatGPT is over capacity and you can’t use it anyway. It’s slow even in the best of situations, and its blocky white-and-gray interface doesn’t exactly scream high design. There’s not even a mobile app.

Adam D’Angelo, the CEO of Quora, sees that as something of an opportunity. Since last summer, just before the chatbot craze swept the tech industry, Quora has been feverishly working on an app called Poe that D’Angelo says he hopes can make bots easier for everyone to use by bringing them all in one place. “We have a lot of different things we want to build on top of this technology,” he says. “But the starting point is just, let’s make it easy for people to use it.”

The way D’Angelo sees it, we’re only at the beginning of a huge boom in interactive bots. Right now, there’s Bard and Bing and ChatGPT and not much else, but pretty soon, there will be hundreds, thousands, or even millions of different bots for different purposes. And for almost any company that isn’t a tech giant, “the amount of work it takes to make a high-quality chat experience is just too much.” Google and Microsoft have the resources to do it, of course, and I’d bet you won’t see either in Poe anytime soon. But there’s a whole industry of bot startups still to come, including from Poe itself: Quora just announced a user-created bots feature that lets you build your own bot to talk like a pirate, roast you mercilessly, or teach you Japanese.  ... ' 

End-to-End Encrypted Messaging

 Just started to read, excellent overview. Will follow with more comments as it applies to my work.

End-to-End Encrypted Messaging Hardcover – April 30, 2020   by Rolf Oppliger  (Author)

This exciting resource introduces the core technologies that are used for Internet messaging. The book explains how Signal protocol, the cryptographic protocol that currently dominates the field of end to end encryption (E2EE) messaging, is implemented and addresses privacy issues related to E2EE messengers. The Signal protocol and its application in WhatsApp is explored in depth, as well as the different E2EE messengers that have been made available in the last decade are also presented, including SnapChat. It addresses the notion of self-destructing messages (as originally introduced by SnapChat) and the use of metadata to perform traffic analysis.

Google Messaging

TheVerge looks at Google messaging.  Agreed is a mess.  Been using Hangouts of late because some clients do.  Worth a look.

Exclusive: Inside Hangouts, Google's big fix for its messaging mess
How Google built its new messaging platform for Gmail, Android, iOS, and Chrome... and what took so long

By Ellis Hamburger and Dieter Bohn  ....  in theVerge

Microsoft Teams

An Overview.   Have now used Slack for a number of collaboration examples with projects, and like it.    Will MS Teams do as well?  I do note its not available for standard versions of Office, a mistake, its where people will learn to use it, and select it over options like Slack.  Also want to see assistant methods like Cortana well integrated in context.

Microsoft Teams cheat sheet
Microsoft's answer to Slack, Teams provides group messaging, voice and video calls, and useful integrations with other Office 365 apps. Here's how to get set up in Teams and find your way around.
By Jonathan Hassell in Computerworld.

Email is everywhere, and it has been around seemingly forever. But is it really the most effective way for groups of people to collaborate on work and advance business objectives? Several new products on the marketplace, most notably Slack, wager that the answer is indeed no.

Slack and similar team messaging products try to remove threaded email conversations as a common platform of communication in organizations and replace it with instant message-like short bursts organized into channels based on the context or subject of the conversation. Microsoft Teams is the Redmond behemoth’s suggested alternative to Slack. Teams, which is included with Office 365 business and enterprise subscriptions, is essentially group chat software with some interesting features thrown in around working with documents and spreadsheets, especially those stored in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business. .... " 

Facebook Messenger's M

Been asked to go back and look at some of the AI/Assistant components of Facebook M, just launched in the UK after some time in the US.  Facebook's work in the AI and machine learning space continues to expand.

In particular look at their work on dialog research,  covered in the tags below. Ultimately handling dialog intelligently will be key in assistance.  The operationally multilingual approach is also rare.

Everything You Need to Know About Facebook Messenger's M Assistant
Facebook's M assistant can now suggest video or voice calls   By Christian de Looper in DigitalTrends. 

Notice a little "M" logo near the textbox in Facebook Messenger? It's the social media network's artificially intelligent assistant that's meant to offer suggestions in your conversations -- similar to how Google Assistant can jump in to help in conversations via Allo. With the assistant officially rolled out across the U.S., it is now available in both English and Spanish to all Messenger users in the country.  

M is now able to provide suggestions in Spanish -- like sending payments or sharing your location -- and the feature is gradually rolling out in Mexico for iOS and Android, Facebook told Digital Trends. If you'd like to receive M Suggestions in Spanish, you can change the preferred language to Spanish.

M itself is powered by Facebook-built AI, and so far works by popping up in your chats when it detects that it can help with something. For example, if you mention going somewhere, M can detect this and will offer up a quick way to book a ride with Uber or Lyft (you can set your preference) -- all without leaving the Messenger app.

Before diving into what Facebook's M can do, there are a few things to keep in mind. Most importantly, Facebook is still working on M and it's likely the assistant will evolve a lot over the next few months and years. It will also roll out globally at some point as Facebook says users across the globe will "start seeing a redesigned way to compose messages." If you want nothing to do with this AI revolution, or if you think M makes your conversations too cluttered, you can mute it by heading to Messenger's settings -- tap on the person icon on the top-right of Messenger's main page, then tap M settings and toggle Suggestions off.   ... ." 

My coverage of this and many other personal assistants.

Conversational Commerce

Another look at conversational commerce.   Though beyond what we think of as messaging.   Including memory of previous interactions and leveraging what is known about the correspondents. Positioned as a service with value.  Examples at the link:

Why your business should pay attention to Conversational Commerce  in Unified Inbox: 

In an article published by Customer Think (http://bit.ly/2w3vhGy), Amrita Bhattacharyya writes: “Conversational Commerce refers to using natural language within a messenger application (Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, and others) or using voice assistants (Siri, Amazon Alexa, and others) to interact with a business for an inquiry, purchase, or customer service.”

Conversational Commerce enables a person to, quite literally, message their refrigerator! For example, you would text your refrigerator “Do we have milk?” Using a combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), your refrigerator would text you back “Yes, but at your current rate of consumption, it will be gone tomorrow. Would you like me to place an order with Peapod?”

This technology is not science fiction from Star Trek, it’s actually available today!

Here are a few more interesting scenarios:   .... " 

Scientists using Slack

And other messaging tools.  My own experience is that most people that are balancing multiple real time, multiple participant tasks use messaging tools.   More are now also emerging.   And AI bot style add-ons are also now being included to enhance the experience through attentive and cognitive methods.  Expect that to evolve.  In Nature: 

How scientists use Slack
Eight ways labs benefit from the popular workplace messaging tool.  by Jeffrey M. Perkel ..... 

Another Messaging App or Service Concierge

In Verge:   Did remind me of Hangouts at first, but then with AI and better voice recognition included.   More assistant like.    Concierge like.    A replacement of Apps?   That gets you to the service that you need.   Built on Google Assistant?  Now just convince a few hundred million people to switch over. Available this summer.

" ... Google is announcing a new messaging app today. It's called Allo and its main feature is a Google assistant that's built right in. Google says it'll be available later this summer — for free — on both iOS and Android.

Allo (pronounced like "Aloe" and not like "'allo, guv'nor!") is a mobile-only app that you might think is meant to replace Google's other messaging app, Hangouts. But you'd be wrong. Allo is explicitly meant to be a fresh start for Google's new communication's division (which also runs Hangouts and Project Fi).

"It's really liberating to start from scratch sometimes," says Erik Kay, director of engineering, communications products. And Allo does feel like a fresh new start. Its interface is clean and easy to understand, with some clever little innovations on what you've seen in other chat apps like WhatsApp or Messenger. ...  "