Irati Hurtado

There's an assumption baked into most conversational AI roadmaps that nobody really questions anymore: more human-like is better.

For most of computing history, the interface stood between you and the machine, and good UX meant designing that interface so a user's skill level stopped mattering much.

A lot of conversations with AI products go wrong.

Have you ever noticed how even the best chatbots sometimes sound off?

The way we interact with machines is evolving rapidly, and digital avatars are at the forefront of that transformation.

Emojis are graphic symbols or ideograms that represent not only facial expressions, but also ideas and concepts.

Chatbots, although a trendy product now, have existed for decades.

Personality is the enduring set of characteristics or qualities that form a person’s distinctive character.

Programming languages are systems of notation used for writing computer programs (e.g., Java), whereas natural languages are systems of communication that have developed naturally in human communities (e.g., French).

If you ask Amazon Alexa if it is a woman, it will answer "I'm not a woman, I'm an AI".

If you are into psychology, you have probably heard about Theory of Mind before.

The difference between artificial intelligence (AI) and human intelligence is well known: whereas humans use their brain, their memory, and other cognitive abilities, AI uses data provided by humans.

Some weeks ago, I attended a conference where several of the presenters discussed language corpora they had created as part of different research projects.

The arrival of ChatGPT at the end of last year has sparked a debate about how it could impact several different fields, ranging from education, to content creation, to finance and to many others.

In previous blog posts, I discussed the use of software such as AntConc or Voyant to analyze corpus data.

If you're into the Digital Humanities, you probably know about the importance of text analysis.

Synthetic voices, or artificial voices, are part of our lives (who has never talked to iPhone's Siri, Amazon Alexa, or Microsoft Cortana?).

If you're interested in corpus linguistics, you probably know that some of the things this field involves includes searching for patterns in a group of texts (e.g., find frequent words or collocations).

Some weeks ago, we heard about Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer who claimed that LaMDA, a chatbot that can carry unstructured conversations with people, had a 'human soul'.

What is phonetic transcription?

Some months ago, I bought my first smart speaker: an Amazon echo.

Whether you want to build a corpus to document an interesting linguistic phenomenon or simply want to have language data to train your AI models, the process of data annotation is crucial.

Nowadays, a lot of linguistics research uses language data from Twitter.

If you are into language research, you probably use R to analyze your data.

In a previous blog post, I wrote about automatic transcription software that you can use to speed up your transcription process.

I recently discovered the fascinating world of Twitter bots (what's that?).

What is a haiku?

As a linguist, I have always been curious about how computers can make sense of texts that combine different languages or language varieties.

As a linguist, I often need to find speakers from a particular country or region to gather data on how they say something.

I recently found out about an R package that allows you to create Reveal.js presentations in R using RMarkdown syntax.

I will start blogging very soon.