We have no real news today so let’s just amuse ourselves with tech. We’ll start with a “second-generation support chatbot” from Intercom, which answers questions as soon as users start typing. You might find that rude but the vendor says it shows the system truly understands customers’ problems. Feel better?
Like much of the tech industry, the News Gods seem to be phoning it in this week. They did offer a modestly interesting acquisition: CRM vendor Pipedrive purchased email marketing automation system Mailigen. Interesting because the idea seems to be for salespeople to run their own automated email campaigns. Maybe that makes them “citizen marketers”.
Looking for something to read when you get trapped at home by coronavirus? This 247-page compendium of global digital statistics from We Are Social and Hootsuite includes everything from population statistics to the gender split of Snapchat users in Qatar. Did you know that people in the U.S. have more smart home devices than average but make less use of voice search? Or that Americans are more concerned about misuse of their data but less likely to use ad blockers? Hours of fun.
Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content. But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines. Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results. We’ll see if competitors do the same.