Eyeo Festival Videos: Check them out

The Eyeo Festival just posted all of the videos from the 2018 festival, which is such a great service. Above is my talk on how we in the Quartz Bot Studio tell stories with conversational interfaces.

The festival had so many great speakers, and it's literally impossible to see them all live.

Here are some of my favorites I did see at the time, and highly recommend:

Check them out! 


Giving Better Weather to Alexa

Nearly every day, someone in our family asks Alexa for the day's weather. The default response is fine -- high temp, low temp, sun or rain.

But given our three nor'easters, intense wind chills, and high-wind days, that wasn't enough. How much rain? When will it start? How much snow? How cold will it feel?

We needed something better.

Fortunately the US National Weather Service does a fantastic job writing up little descriptions of what's in store for every spot in the country. It's been my go-to source for years. Could I get Alexa to say that?

Short answer: Yes, I could. And now you can add "Better Weather" to your Alexa, too. For free. (In the US only, for now.)

For a longer description of how I made it, read on. 

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Heel, Rotson! My list of computer-generated dog names

Shadoopy. Dango. Ray-Bella. Figgie.

If I told you those were names of actual dogs in New York City, would you believe me?

They're not. They were generated by a machine-learning algorithm mimicking dog names after it "studied" a list of 81,542 dogs registered in NYC.

The experiment, which took just a few hours Saturday, was something I've wanted to try since I saw the playful, awesome work of Janelle Shane and her experiments using neural networks to generate paint colors, guinea pig names and Harry Potter fan fiction.

I happened to have some free time, and decided to give it a shot. Along the way I:

  • built, in mere minutes, a computer in the cloud powerful enough for machine learning
  • made and played with a recurrent neural network
  • learned a little more about machine learning
  • had a lot of fun

The program generated lots of names, including many that existed in the original data. Once I filtered those out, I had almost 400 computer-created, mostly plausible dog names. Here are some of my favorites:

Rotson
Dudly
Lenzy
Murta
Cookees
Geortie
Dewi
Chocobe
Sckrig
Booncy
Cramp
Dango
Ray-Bella
Santha
Coocoda
Satty
Bronz
Shadoopy
Mishtak
Figgie
Grimby
Phince
Bum-Charmo
Soma
Blant
Snowflatey

If you'd like to geek out about how I did this, read on. You can do it, too.

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Qs and As About Bots for News

In my new job as a bot-maker and product manager at Quartz, I've been asked lots to share my thots about bots.

For a deep dive about conversational interfaces and what they mean to journalism (according to me), you can check out this Nieman Lab interview.

If you'd like a quicker scan, here are some questions and answers I prepared ahead of a panel about bots organized by the New York City chapter of the Online News Association. Here are those notes, and some links, too:

What should you consider before you start working on a bot?

  • You're entering uncharted territory! Have fun, explore, try new things.
  • There are no obvious places to find your bot. Bot makers talk about "discoverability" of bots, which is pretty problematic everywhere at this point.
  • So consider building where people already are interacting with you.
  • Make a "worker bee" bot that does a particular task well -- not a "know it all" bot like Siri or Alexa.
  • Is the information being exchanged sensitive? If so, think carefully. Making bots often means sending conversations through one or more 3rd-party services.
  • Play!

What are the specific design questions you need to keep in mind?

Read more »

A New Role: Bots and Apps at Quartz

It's been an amazing run.

For nearly 16 years I've been at radio station WNYC, working with dedicated, talented people to inform New Yorkers every day and to help them navigate elections, blackouts, hurricanes and terror attacks.

Most recently I've helped mix code, design and reporting into new forms of journalism with brilliant colleagues on the WNYC Data News Team.

Along the way I've been tinkering with bots, chat systems and artificial intelligence. These explorations, together with my lifelong interest in journalism technology, have led me to a new role at Quartz.

I'll be building bots in the new Quartz Bot Studio and managing future iterations of Quartz's breakthrough iPhone and Android apps.

It's such an honor. I've been a fan of Quartz's executive editor and VP of product Zach Seward for many years, and I'm always impressed by how well Quartz crafts its site, newsletters, tools and apps to be super useful and exceptionally user-friendly. I feel so fortunate to be joining that team.

This all begins two weeks from today, which won't leave nearly enough time to get through my goodbyes and recount all of my memories at WNYC. But I'm excited about what's ahead, and I'll always be a listener and a member.

Building a "Build-A-Bot" Workshop

I've been playing a lot with bots lately, and recently had a great opportunity to help others play, too.

It was part of the Future.Today conference in New York City last month. Futurist and organizer Amy Webb planned deep discussions about artificial intelligence and human-machine interactions on the main stage. In a side room, she wanted to give the audience tactile bot experiences — and asked me to help. Could I create a "Build-A-Bot" workshop?

The idea was to get conference-goers building chatbots over lunch -- making them easily, without code, and in a way people could "take" their bots home to work on further.

We ended up making nearly 100.

Read more »

Fast Company on WNYC's Storytelling Experiments

Fast Company writer John Paul Titlow did a great job capturing the spirit of experimentation at WNYC -- and me doing an ill-advised live demo on stage:

"Anyone who thinks old-school media can't be stealthy and innovative has never seen John Keefe text a room full of people from a command line on his laptop. But tonight, the senior editor for data news at WNYC—a public radio station founded in 1924—is showing off some things he built to help his colleagues tell stories."

Read the whole story here.

Alexa Baked in a Pi

You can put Alexa in a Raspberry Pi, and that is pretty cool.

Alexa is Amazon's intelligent agent, like Siri for your living room. Standing nearby, you speak to it with a question or a command, and it responds verbally.

Normally Alexa lives inside a $180 device called an Amazon Echo, or the new $50 Echo Dot. But Emily Withrow at Northwestern University's KnightLab told me it was possible to put the Alexa code inside a cheap Raspberry Pi hobby computer. And I happened to have an old Pi lying around.

So I gave it a whirl!

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