Walgreens Automates Vaccine Scheduling with AI Bot

Interesting example here of integrating basic interactions and more complex data based decisions.   

Walgreens automates COVID-19 vaccine scheduling     By Dan Berthiaume - 03/10/2021 in Chainstorage

Walgreens is extending access to COVID-19 vaccine information and scheduling with an artificial intelligence (AI)-based bot.

The drugstore giant, which is receiving a weekly federal allocation of more than 480,000 vaccine doses for distribution across 26 U.S. states and jurisdictions, is now deploying an intelligent conversational voicebot from Nuance Communications. The voicebot will help customers schedule their COVID-19 vaccine appointments 24 hours a day, seven days a week, beyond Walgreens’ existing web-based vaccine portal.

Walgreens customers can now call 1-800-Walgreens or a Walgreens store and speak in English or Spanish to the Nuance voicebot to get answers to COVID-19 questions, confirm eligibility according to applicable guidelines, and schedule their vaccine appointments wherever vaccines are available. The Nuance solution also sends the customer an SMS text to confirm appointments after the call. ... '

Microsoft Expands Cognitive Services

I remain disappointed by the integration level of Cortana assistant with other MS services, but at least now Microsoft seems to be advancing on cognitive services.  Now developers can take the capabilities further.  Includes mention of their 'Build a Bot Strategy'.  But very little about Cortana itself, except as a front end.  Seems they are losing an AI opportunity here to Amazon and Google. Need a framework for assistants, and Microsoft has one of the most popular in Office.

Microsoft makes three more cognitive services generally available
Microsoft is rolling out more of its Cognitive Services programming interfaces, which provide developers with a way to add face recognition, computer vision and more to their apps and services.
By Mary Jo Foley  .... " 

McKinsey on Home Bots

Good piece, though ultimately driving the smart home will need many new 'things' present to influence digitally.  We have started to see examples with Cortana, Alexa and Google Home.   Which all start with easy applications.  Delivering music, news and other 'radio' and web type services.   Specific controllable devices like the Nest.    Still a considerable way to go to drive the home with Bots. Standards are still not there.

Article - McKinsey Quarterly - January 2017
A smart home is where the bot is
By Jean-Baptiste Coumau, Hiroto Furuhashi, and Hugo Sarrazin

Within a decade, our living spaces will be enhanced by a host of new devices and technologies, performing a range of household functions and redefining what it means to feel at home.

The promise of devices that not only meet our household needs but anticipate them as well has been around for decades. To date, that promise remains largely unfulfilled. Advances such as the Nest thermostat by Alphabet (parent company to Google) and Amazon’s Alexa personal assistant are notable, but the home-technology market as a whole remains fragmented, and the potential for a truly smart home is still unrealized. .... "  

Cleverbot Converses

Cleverbot was again brought to my attention.  We had examined some of its predecessors in the 90s as a means for trialing conversational bot applications.   And then I just saw a whimsical demonstration of this shown here:  " ... In early 2017, a Twitch stream of two Google Home devices modified to talk to each other using Cleverbot garnered over 700,000 visitors and over 30,000 peak concurrent viewers ... "  in Wikipedia.    The demonstration is worth a look.   Might something like this, built within a specific context, be a way to think of a bot in action?

AI Will be Whispering in your Ear

Interesting point about the the recently announced Dash earbuds for iPhone.  Is this really a play to get AI in your ear?  You could suggest that this is a better way to deliver AI than Echo or Cortana,  by making their side of the conversation confidential. An ear bud that is also an intelligent bot, and provide tailored information.  In CWorld:  by Mike Egan: 

" ... Every major consumer electronics company is building A.I. earbuds.

Google is working on a secret initiative called Project Aura. (Don't confuse Project Aura with Google's Project Ara, a modular smartphone research program discontinued this week.) Project Aura is rumored to involve an enterprise version of Google Glass, plus one or two audio-only wearables -- often described as Google Glass without the glass -- essentially screen input replaced by voice and Google Now.

Microsoft is reportedly building a hearable device, possibly aimed at women, called the "Clip." The earpiece would enable hands-free interaction with Microsoft's Cortana virtual assistant.

Sony's long-awaited Xperia Ear product is expected to ship in two months. The device is being designed around a "voice agent," which will tell you the news and weather, update you on your schedule for the day, provide turn-by-turn directions, send text messages and answer your trivia questions. One very cool feature that I expect will soon be nearly universal on wireless earbuds is the ability to respond "yes" or "no" to your in-ear virtual assistant silently by nodding or shaking your head.

These consumer electronics giants are trying to head off a wave of insurgent startups who want to own the interface of the future.

A startup called LifeBEAM successfully crowdfunded this year what it calls the Vi headset. The hardware comes with artificial intelligence software that functions as a fitness coach. It can also monitor your temperature, heart rate and other metrics while you're working out. You can also do Siri-like things such as using voice commands to initiate a call. LifeBEAM's Vi is expected to ship next year. ... "

Google Creates an Assistant

Technology review reports on today's I/O presentations:

I like the model of a 'Concierge',  it was the same method we used in our own bot experiment.  Break up information sources into key segments of data, knowledge, people, analysis and more.  Deliver conversationally on contextual results, build searches, models of key needs, and continue to update and learn from the world.   Just a minor challenge.

" ... Google has done well out of its search box. We have come to use it more and more as our collective dependence on computers and the Internet has grown – helping Google swell to its gigantic size.

But on Wednesday Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said it was time to move on from the conventional search engine that his company was built on. He unveiled Google Assistant, an evolution of Google search designed to act like a virtual concierge.

If you search Google for “movies tonight” on your phone today it will display the films in local theaters. With the Google Assistant you can have a short conversation to get that same information, learn about the suggested movies, and book the tickets. For example, you could ask for movies nearby and then add “I want to take the kids” to see only family friendly suggestions. After perusing the options you could ask “Is Jungle Book any good?” to hear a summary of reviews, and then book tickets by saying “I want four tickets to the 8:30 showing.”  ... ' 

More Revealed on Virtual Assistant Viv

Viv, from Siri's creators, is the virtual assistant of your dreams
It's one step closer to giving us the AI from "Her."

Siri made the world aware of the potential of virtual assistants, but several years after its release, it's still a bit basic. Siri can only do certain, very specific tasks, and she doesn't play well with third-party services. So for their next product, Viv, the minds behind Siri aimed to build a much more capable virtual assistant. And at this point, it looks like they've succeeded, judging from a brief demonstration at TechCrunch Disrupt in NYC today. .... " 

Includes video.

Another IFTTT Like Tool for Automated Workflow

This has always been a good idea, surprised there has not been more competition.  Still not ready, in development.  Implications for combining IOT activity.  I would like to see more analysis inserted in such workflows, beyond just detecting and responding to signal.  This could be a way to insert an intelligent bit inside a workflow.

Microsoft has created its own IFTTT tool called Flow,  in the Verge,  By Tom Warren

If This Then That (IFTTT) is an incredibly popular tool that enables features for web services like Twitter to generate an email through automation and lots more. Microsoft appears to be working on a similar tool for businesses to create automated workflows. Twitter user h0x0d discovered Microsoft Flow, a preview service that connects a number of cloud services together.

Microsoft's Flow is designed to connect services like Twitter, Slack, Google Drive, Dropbox, and Office 365. Microsoft lists a number of example "flows" (recipes), including the ability to generate SMS alerts from emails, pull tweets into Excel, or get Slack notifications when a file is uploaded to a Dropbox folder. You can even create flows to copy files from OneDrive for Business to SharePoint. ... " 

What Exactly is a Bot?

The word Bot has started to be used again.  But what is it?    I was struck by Matt Galligan's piece in Medium which takes a broad look at the definition.  We built one that for a short time in the 80s represented a major brand's equity.   See the 'Mr Clean' link tag below for more on that.  A Bot to us meant a system that interacted with you.  It did not attempt to fool you into think it was intelligent, but clearly had a hint of AI, and in the end gave you some value for interacting.  Such a system could have access to as much knowledge and logic as necessary to make it of value.