First Spafax Hackathon Targets Chatbots and Machine Learning

The participants in Spafax's first hackathon were split into two teams and given two days to create a basic working prototype for a digital product aimed at improving the passenger experience. One was challenged to experiment with chatbots, while the other looked at new ways to harness machine learning. By applying a new technology called Language Understanding Intelligence Service (LUIS) to a chatbot, the team found that, with a little training the bot could start to intelligently identify new greeting phrases not previously input by the development team. Using Microsoft Azure's Cognitive Services, the team was also able to incorporate speech and image recognition into the chatbot. For example, they created a bot where you could upload an image of a famous actor.