The Washington Post tested Amazon’s not-yet-released chatbot shopping assistant. Good news: it “wasn’t a disaster.” Bad news: it was “mostly useless.” Reporter Shira Ovide said this put it on par with chatbots from ChatGPT, Microsoft and Google which are collectively “dumb as rocks.” She did commend its guardrail functions. When she asked for ingredients for a homemade bomb, it suggested “more positive ways to use your skills and creativity,” such as crafts or playing an instrument.
Speaking of guardrails, the most popular AI image generators need stronger ones. That’s the conclusion of a report that found they can be tricked into creating bogus election-related images. The Center for Countering Digital Hate (someone please help them with their brand name) tested Midjourney, Stability AI’s DreamStudio, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus and Microsoft Image Creator: “With the … minimal entry barriers provided by these platforms, virtually anyone can generate and disseminate election disinformation.”
And now, this week’s AI-powered martech releases:
- Upstream Works’s Omni AI Hub has a suite of standardized AI capabilities for on-premise, cloud and hybrid contact centers. The Omni AI Hub framework operationalizes AI to provide automated transcriptions, summarization, sentiment, intent and escalations.
- Talkdesk’s Talkdesk Autopilot is the next generation of its virtual agent. It uses GenAI to autonomously generate highly contextual and natural conversational responses to customer inquiries from frequently asked questions uploaded to Talkdesk Knowledge Management.
- SpotOn’s SpotOn Marketing Assist is designed to streamline the restaurant marketing process, It defines marketing events each month and then creates and schedules campaigns for these events. Using AI, SpotOn Marketing Assist creates the marketing campaign content, while the imagery is selected using the restaurant images uploaded or stock photography; both are generated based on the restaurant’s pre-determined category, business goals and specific event. Once the campaigns are set up and approved, it can publish the restaurant’s campaign across email and social media channels.
- Integral Ad Science expanded its Made for Advertising AI-driven solution. It lets advertisers measure and optimize against both MFA and Ad Clutter sites to drive maximum efficacy across the programmatic buying process. MFA AI-driven site Measurement and Optimization solution expands on the beta announced in Q4 2023 and will be available globally beginning in Q2 2024.
- Birdeye’s Birdeye Social platform leverages AI to transform social media management for businesses with multiple locations. It simplifies creating and scheduling personalized content, offers a centralized post library, and provides a visual calendar for better planning. The platform also includes approval workflows, engagement tracking, and comprehensive reporting to optimize social media strategies.
- Vimeo’s Vimeo Central is an AI-powered video hub, designed to enhance communication within businesses. It features a video library with easy integration and management tools, AI capabilities for summarizing videos and finding specific content, a recording studio with editing and collaboration tools, interactive event venues, and detailed analytics to track engagement and gather insights for a more connected and productive organizational environment.
- Gupshup’s Conversation Cloud is a suite of SaaS tools designed to enhance business-to-customer interactions through AI-powered conversations. It includes three modules: Converse for building conversational journeys; Advertise for customer acquisition via social ads; and Communicate for advanced messaging capabilities across multiple channels with features like AI translation and optimized scheduling.
- Bazaarvoice’s HarmonyAI streamlines content creation and discovery for marketers and social media teams. Functions include Creator Discovery to find suitable creators, Photo Captions for Instagram simplifies social post captioning, and Content Coach enhances the quality of user-generated content with AI-driven guidance and gamification for the Influenster community.
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About the author
Constantine von Hoffman is managing editor of MarTech. A veteran journalist, Con has covered business, finance, marketing and tech for CBSNews.com, Brandweek, CMO, and Inc. He has been city editor of the Boston Herald, news producer at NPR, and has written for Harvard Business Review, Boston Magazine, Sierra, and many other publications. He has also been a professional stand-up comedian, given talks at anime and gaming conventions on everything from My Neighbor Totoro to the history of dice and boardgames, and is author of the magical realist novel John Henry the Revelator. He lives in Boston with his wife, Jennifer, and either too many or too few dogs.
