Michael Akilian's guest appearances

Michael Akilian

O'Reilly Bots Podcast - O'Reilly Media Podcast

Dennis Mortensen

Lili Cheng

Chris Messina

Michael Schneider

Sarah Guo

Ben Brown

Cathy Pearl

Brad Abrams

Tim Hwang

Amir Shevat

Tom Coates

Joshua Browder

Andrew Therriault

Tom Hadfield

Richard Socher

OwlTail

Jason Laska

The O’Reilly Bots Podcast: The technical and social dynamics of solving scheduling problems.In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I talk to Jason Laska and Michael Akilian of Clara Labs, creator of a virtual assistant—Clara—that schedules meetings and interacts in natural language through email. E-mail is, to me, a highly promising (and somewhat underrated) venue for bots. Messaging is growing quickly, but e-mail is still the standard way to communicate within businesses and especially between businesses. E-mail conventions are somewhat standardized, and much of it is highly routinized—automatically generated reports, receipts, etc.—so it’s ripe for automation. Laska, who leads the machine learning efforts at Clara Labs, and Akilian, the company’s co-founder and CTO, talk about the reality of developing an AI-driven product, and explain Clara’s human-in-the-loop system. “People are still there to do some of the most challenging aspects of this work, and that’s exactly what you want to use people for,” says Laska.Discussion points:  How both the Clara bot and its users deal with the often-complex social dynamics of scheduling, which is “fundamentally a negotiation,” says Akilian. How Clara parses and evaluates dates and times Email vs. messaging as a platform for AI bots  Other Links  Jerry Chen’s article The New Moats: Why Systems of Intelligence are the Next Defensible Business Model Microsoft’s paper on developing calendar help (PDF) Google’s multilingual neural machine translation system Facebook’s Poncho bot for weather forecasts

The O’Reilly Bots Podcast: The technical and social dynamics of solving scheduling problems.In this episode of the <a href="https://www.oreilly.com/topics/oreilly-bots-podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">O’Reilly Bots Podcast</a>, Pete Skomoroch and I talk to <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonlaska" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Jason Laska</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/akilian" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Michael Akilian</a> of <a href="https://claralabs.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Clara Labs</a>, creator of a virtual assistant—Clara—that schedules meetings and interacts in natural language through email. E-mail is, to me, a highly promising (and somewhat underrated) venue for bots. Messaging is growing quickly, but e-mail is still the standard way to communicate within businesses and especially between businesses. E-mail conventions are somewhat standardized, and much of it is highly routinized—automatically generated reports, receipts, etc.—so it’s ripe for automation. Laska, who leads the machine learning efforts at Clara Labs, and Akilian, the company’s co-founder and CTO, talk about the reality of developing an AI-driven product, and explain Clara’s human-in-the-loop system. “People are still there to do some of the most challenging aspects of this work, and that’s exactly what you want to use people for,” says Laska.Discussion points: <ul> <li>How both the Clara bot and its users deal with the often-complex social dynamics of scheduling, which is “fundamentally a negotiation,” says Akilian.</li> <li>How Clara parses and evaluates dates and times</li> <li>Email vs. messaging as a platform for AI bots</li> </ul> Other Links <ul> <li>Jerry Chen’s article <a href="https://news.greylock.com/the-new-moats-53f61aeac2d9" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The New Moats: Why Systems of Intelligence are the Next Defensible Business Model</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/paper2616.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Microsoft’s paper</a> on developing calendar help (PDF)</li> <li><a href="https://research.googleblog.com/2016/11/zero-shot-translation-with-googles.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Google’s multilingual neural machine translation system</a></li> <li>Facebook’s <a href="https://poncho.is/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Poncho bot</a> for weather forecasts</li></ul>

Jason Laska and Michael Akilian on using AI to schedule meetings