The Challenge Of Designing A Chatbot With Manners

Tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are betting on chatbots and virtual assistants as the mechanism through which AI will enter our lives. And while Google Allo or Facebook's M might work within a one-on-one chat situation, what happens when chatbots make the leap to group chat, a much more complex social interaction? They need to be polite--or at least not creepy. That was the consensus at the 2016 Fast Company Innovation Festival, where Lili Cheng, General Manager at Microsoft Research, Jason Cornwell, the Communications UX Designer at Google, Jeremy Goldberg, a Product Designer at Facebook who worked on its chatbot M, and Noah Weiss, head of the Search, Learning, and Intelligence Group at Slack, joined Fast Company's Cliff Kuang to discuss AI's next challenges. You're chatting with a group of people you've met recently, and you're making plans to see each other again.