Summit 2016: Rise of the (content) chat bots - how NLP, search and recommendations play together / Shaked Bar

Chat bots are the latest AI trend, featuring bots that do anything from ordering flowers to being your lawyer. In this session I will present a content chatbot and how it is built. The synergy between NLP, search and Outbrain's recommendation algorithms enables us to understand the user’s information need from the chat, and respond with relevant and timely content. These play together in building a user friendly bot, where one can get the latest headlines, receive user-specific recommendations, and ask in natural language about specific topics or categories such as “Donald Trump” or “Sports” . The talk will describe how within a few weeks we took the idea from inception to being demonstrated by Mark Zuckerberg in his keynote in Facebook’s Developer Conference. We overcame the technological and algorithmic challenges in developing the content bot, yet are still surprised by some of the bizarre inputs users enter in the bot, some of which we will share. MP3