We present TacoBot, a task-oriented dialogue system built for the inaugural Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, which assists users in completing multi-step cooking and home improvement tasks. TacoBot is designed with a user-centered principle and aspires to deliver a collaborative and accessible dialogue experience. Towards that end, it is equipped with accurate language understanding, flexible dialogue management, and engaging response generation. Furthermore, TacoBot is backed by a strong search engine and an automated end-to-end test suite. In bootstrapping the development of TacoBot, we explore a series of data augmentation strategies to train advanced neural language processing models and continuously improve the dialogue experience with collected real conversations. At the end of the semifinals, TacoBot achieved an average rating of 3.55/5.0.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reinventing the creative landscape for marketers. One big leap: Brands are no longer merely seen as objects, but entities with personalities that can interact dynamically with people, according to Winston Binch, chief digital officer for Deutsch North America, the ad agency behind Taco Bell's award-winning taco-ordering chatbot, the Tacobot. Binch spoke to Catharine Hays, executive director of the Wharton Future of Advertising Program, on the Marketing Matters show, which airs on Wharton Business Radio, SiriusXM channel 111. Get the entire 10-part series on Ray Dalio in PDF. Save it to your desktop, read it on your tablet, or email to your colleagues.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reinventing the creative landscape for marketers. One big leap: Brands are no longer merely seen as objects, but entities with personalities that can interact dynamically with people, according to Winston Binch, chief digital officer for Deutsch North America, the ad agency behind Taco Bell's award-winning taco-ordering chatbot, the Tacobot. Binch spoke to Catharine Hays, executive director of the Wharton Future of Advertising Program, on the Marketing Matters show, which airs on Wharton Business Radio, SiriusXM channel 111. An edited transcript of the conversation follows. Catherine Hays: You are one of the true leaders in this space between AI and creativity.

Just this week, American fast food chain Taco Bell announced the TacoBot, which you can text via the Slack messaging app. You can use the bot to order food for yourself or a group of friends or co-workers, ask for recommendations and pay for it through Slack. As an executive said at the launch: "TacoBot is the next best thing to having your own Taco Bell butler…and who wouldn't want that?" You can order Domino's pizza through Amazon's AI assistant Echo (which hasn't made its way to the UK yet), and multinationals like Unilever and BMW use a simple Q&A bot that can answer any question a customer services employee would. The Henn-na hotel, which opened in Nagasaki, Japan last summer, is the world's first hotel to be fully staffed by robots – from check-in staff, to porters and the concierge.

Automated software assistants, or chatbots, are moving into the mainstream, helping you more efficiently order tacos, manage human resources tasks and generate sales leads from a messaging interface. As the latest plot point on artificial intelligence's long timeline, chatbots simulate natural language to make it seem as if you are engaging in a discussion with a human concierge who is acting on your behalf. Chatbots picked up steam thanks to messaging platforms such as WeChat and Slack, while Facebook, Microsoft and Google are building similar capabilities to bolster their platforms. Now businesses outside of the technology sector have begun building their own bots to strengthen connections among chat-happy millennials. Yet all of the bot-builders must clear a key hurdle: offering enough personalization to help their bots evolve from a nifty chat tool to an essential digital assistant.

Aptly named TacoBot, the software will make use of AI advancements like natural language processing to let users talk with the bot, order food, and even pay for items entirely through Slack. TacoBot can also provide recommendations, answer questions, and organize group office orders. It apparently comes equipped with a "witty personality you'd expect from Taco Bell." "The TacoBot Slack integration is the latest step on our journey to make the brand more accessible wherever and whenever our fans want it," said Lawrence Kim, Taco Bell's director of digital innovation and on demand, in a statement. "Taco Bell is about food tailor-made for social consumption with friends, and that's why integrating with a social communications platform like Slack makes perfect sense. TacoBot is the next best thing to having your own Taco Bell butler… and who wouldn't want that??" Kim asks a good question, and the answer is nobody.

Last month American fast food giant Taco Bell introduced the "TacoBot", a Siri-like version of the cashiers that take your order at its restaurant. TacoBot is loftily described as the future of ordering tacos and the software makes use of AI (artificial intelligence) advancements like natural language processing to let users talk with the bot, order food, and even pay for items entirely through platforms such as Facebook and Slack. "The TacoBot Slack integration is the latest step on our journey to make the brand more accessible wherever and whenever our fans want it," said Lawrence Kim, Taco Bell's director of digital innovation and on demand, in a statement. "Taco Bell is about food tailor-made for social consumption with friends, and that's why integrating with a social communications platform like Slack makes perfect sense. TacoBot is the next best thing to having your own Taco Bell butler… and who wouldn't want that??" TacoBot has the ability to recommend menu items, answer questions, organise group orders, and facilitate transactions fully equipped with a Taco Bell "personality" as seen below.

Welcome to 2016, where you can buy flowers, book a flight and order an Uber through messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and Slack. Last week, Taco Bell and its agency, Deutsch, unveiled the TacoBot, a Siri-like version of the cashiers that take your order at its restaurants. Taco Bell built the bot for workplaces that use Slack's messaging platform to communicate internally. Now, instead of someone jotting everyone's orders on a Post-it and hoping the drive-thru attendant gets everything right, they can ask TacoBot to put in the order for them. "I've described TacoBot as your own personal Taco Bell butler," said Andy McCraw, Taco Bell's digital innovation and on-demand product manager.

An artificial intelligence "chatbot" from Taco Bell now lets you order a meal in a smartphone text exchange that might look something like this: TacoBot: Hello there, I'm your TacoBot, I can help you order a meal for you or your team. TacoBot: Sounds good... do you want to keep adding stuff? Brands like Taco Bell and tech companies large and small are betting that more and more people will start using this "conversational" way of interacting online instead of clicking through on-screen menus. If the trend catches on -- as firms like Facebook and Microsoft expect -- it could transform the digital landscape by allowing smartphone users to find information or make purchases with simple text messages, bypassing apps and search engines. Among the companies already developing or launching chatbots are the Wall Street Journal, CNN and retail giants Sephora and H&M.

The simplest answer is a computer software program that is able to intelligently communicate with humans through artificial intelligence. Tech companies like Microsoft are placing big bets on the computer software, which is able to intelligently communicate with humans via AI. Microsoft recently launched its first attempt with a Twitter chatbot named "Tay"; however things didn't go quite according to plan when "Tay" started spewing racist comments to some user's questions. It's just "back to the drawing board," he said recently at the company's developer conference. Microsoft also announced that it will be launching new tools to help developers build their own chatbots into their apps.