Powered by Data - October 21, 2024
Keep up-to-date on conversational AI & chatbots with fascinating data points and weekly news.
- French AI startup Mistral has launched "Les Ministraux," a new family of generative AI models optimized for edge devices like laptops and phones. The models, Ministral 3B and Ministral 8B are designed for tasks requiring local, privacy-first inference, such as translation, smart assistants, and autonomous robotics. With a context window of 128,000 tokens, they can process text as long as a 50-page book. Ministral 8B is currently available for research, while commercial use requires contacting Mistral. The models are also accessible through Mistral's cloud platform. Mistral claims these models outperform competitors like Meta's Llama and Google's Gemma on various benchmarks.
Read More - A study published in Nature Human Behaviour tested the effectiveness of a WhatsApp chatbot in increasing COVID-19 vaccination rates in Argentina. The researchers conducted a large-scale randomized controlled trial with 249,705 participants to compare a behaviorally informed chatbot with one-way reminder messages. The results showed that the chatbot more than tripled vaccine uptake compared to the control group, with a 1.6 percentage point increase. It also nearly doubled the uptake compared to one-way reminders. This highlights how interactive, behaviorally informed chatbots can significantly boost vaccination rates and be useful for other health behaviors.
Read More - Personifi AI has developed Shazam, an intelligent collar that functions like a chatbot for pets, allowing dogs and cats to "talk" using pre-recorded human voices. By simulating conversations, Shazam gives the illusion that pets have humanlike personalities. Beyond its chatbot features, the collar offers safety functions like detecting rattlesnakes, tracking missing pets, and monitoring routines. Priced at $495 for cats and $595 for dogs, it also requires a yearly subscription for personalized voices. Critics, however, argue that while fun, the chatbot may not strengthen pet-owner relationships and could be misused for social media.
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