Further down the automated creative trail, Wibbitz uses natural language processing to interpret text embedded in email, video, metadata, social posts, personal profiles, etc., and then assembles snippets into a video that presents the same ideas as the original text. So the next time your life flashes before your eyes, you may be facing a Wibbitz-based advertisement instead of imminent death. A cheering prospect.
IBM and Salesforce.com announced a strategic partnership to connect their respective artificial intelligence products, Watson and Einstein. What’s intriguing is the press release describes the deal as bringing Watson’s “structured and unstructured data” to the party, not any grand cognitive capabilities. They specifically mention exposing data from IBM’s Weather.com business within Salesforce. More evidence that AI is approaching a commodity but data is the new crown jewel.
Might as well stick with product news today. Pegasystems, which manages customer-related business processes, has announced new artificial intelligence features that will analyze “millions of actions taken every day on every desktop from any application” to uncover inefficiencies in sales and service operations. Examples include excessive toggling between different applications, time spent on unproductive activities, and productivity lost to slow system response. AI-based features don’t really qualify as news these days, but this item does illustrate how AI can be used for more than content recommendations.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.