Para los humanos es realmente difícil responder a la pregunta, ¿cuál es tu propósito? Pero para un bot, un sistema construido y desarrollado con una intención en concreto, debe tener un propósito. ¿Qué vas a hacer? ¿Por qué estás aquí? Preguntas sencillas que acabarán definiendo su existencia.

Todo esto me recuerda a la película de 300, en la que Leónidas grita a sus soldados “Espartanos, ¿cuál es vuestro oficio?” Como respuesta a esta pregunta, todos los soldados responden al unísono afirmando que ser soldados. Sí, ellos han nacido para ser soldados.

Cuando reviso mis conversaciones en Facebook Messenger, me doy…

An underutilized marketing channel with new potential.

I’m always fascinated how Startups gain traction and build a user base. There are a lot of things big companies can learn from how startups do their marketing and grow their users. In the real early stages, startups may not have marketing people or big advertising budgets. In Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers, the author talks about 19 traction channels a startup could implement to help bring in new users. One channel that stood out for me is Engineering as Marketing.

So what is Engineering as Marketing?

Engineering As Marketing is the practice of using engineering resources…

It may be difficult for a human, to answer the question, “What is your purpose?” But a bot, a thing that was built and developed with intention, should have a purpose. What do you do? Why are you here? Simple questions that define its existence.

It reminds me of the movie 300 where King Leonidas screams out “SPARTANS, WHAT IS YOUR PROFESSION?” The Spartans make a loud noise signifying they are all soldiers. They were born to be soldiers.

When I look through my Facebook messenger, the past 20 or more messages have been with bots. A little sad…

Look through lenses when deciding how to spend your time.

There are many positive reasons on why you should have a side project such as, personal growth, increased creativity, financial opportunities, education and more.

My close friends know that I have side projects list that runs as long as my arm. I use an app called Clear to add, review and re-order them from time to time. The difficult part for me is deciding which ones I should spend time on first.

At a few places I have worked, we evaluated client projects through these three lenses: Fun, Fame, and…

We developed a Comedy Bot for the IBM Watson Dev Conference to find out.

To preface this was not a task to develop an algorithm that could create original jokes but to see if we could script a humorous conversation that felt naturally delivered by a bot.

A robot walks into a bar, orders a drink, and lays down some cash. The bartender says, “we don’t serve robots.” The robot replies, “oh, but some day you will.”

“Tell me a joke” is actually a common request a bot receives, a way a user tests the bots capabilities. At the IBM…

A run through of the 2 days at the Watson Hackathon 2015

IBM held their World of Watson conference last week in Brooklyn and as part of that conference they put on the first official IBM Watson Hackathon.

To get further hands on experience with the Watson API’s our agency decided to put a team into the Hackathon. We ended up with a team of 4 primarily front end developers including myself. The Friday before the Hackathon we decided to do a quick brainstorm of ideas based on the Watson services currently available on the IBM Bluemix platform. …

With the Watson Hackathon coming up on May 4–5 I thought it would be useful to have a one pager of the current 13 cognitive services available.

• Concept Expansion
• Concept Insights
• Language Identification
• Machine Translation
• Message Resonance
• Personality Insights
• Question and Answer
• Relationship Extraction
• Speech to Text
• Text to Speech
• Tradeoff Analytics
• Visual Recognition
• Visualization Rendering

IBM also recently acquired AlchemyAPI significantly expanding Watson’s ecosystem. The AlchemyAPI has two core services

• AlchemyLanguage
• AlchemyVision

The Watson Developer Cloud Github account has a collection of sample and starter apps that use the Watson REST APIs and SDKs.

Certain Watson services are contextually…