The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots

A handful of companies employ humans pretending to be robots pretending to be humans. In the past two years, companies offering do-anything concierges (Magic, Facebook’s M, GoButler); shopping assistants (Operator, Mezi); and e-mail schedulers (X.ai, Clara) have sprung up. The goal for most of these businesses is to require as few humans as possible. People are expensive. They don’t scale. They need health insurance. But for now, the companies are largely powered by people, clicking behind the curtain and making it look like magic.
--
Facebook turned the spotlight on human-assisted AI last summer when it introduced M, a chirpy personal assistant bot that lives in Messenger, its chat app. Unlike Facebook’s all-automated commercial Messenger bots, all of M’s AI-generated responses are reviewed, edited if necessary and sent out by a team of a few dozen contractors, who work out of the social network’s Menlo Park, Calif., campus, the company said. Beyond that, details on M are sparse: Facebook won’t say what hours the contractors work or how often they correct M’s guesses.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-18/the-humans-hiding-behind-the-chatbots
https://x.ai/