All Quotes

"Initially it was myself and Pierre building web prototypes and games. We tried to make video games for CBT for 9 months, things like interactive fiction prototypes for dynamics of engagement. They all had so much dialogue it made sense for us to move to chatbots. Pamela Fox stepped in as our head of engineering and helped rebuild the stack."

"My background is in clinical psychology research and I reached out to the best in the field. We all agree that our work doesn’t scale. Athena Robinson, a former Stanford psychiatry professor just joined as our Chief Clinical Officer. Other than that, some of my other colleagues or friends have joined too — people who really care about mental health issues. It makes for a really great workplace — this idea is bigger than any of us. When you look at the data and what people share, it’s so personal and you don’t even hear things like this in human therapy."

"At the end, we always ask: How are you feeling, better, the same, or worse? We look at the failed transcripts and try to troubleshoot on what went wrong — we try to minimize people feeling worse. It’s hard to figure out what we can do for those feeling the same. When you get it wrong people are not shy about telling you — when a button doesn’t cover everything users want to say, users will tell you."

"We also use standard search metrics, like precision and recall. For example, to detect people in crisis, we prefer recall search methods over precision as we want to be overinclusive and to identify anyone who could have a problem so we can refer them to human counselors or a help hotline."

"We learn all the time and have learned to keep track of our learning. If you have two buttons, they should represent genuinely different pathways. If there is no natural response or utterance, we use an emoji as an easy button filler. We’ve learned a lot about images. We used to have a black and white image of a bomb and we found it was triggering for certain people, so we had to remove it. Generally I like the black and white images. Many people really dislike minions. There’s a lot due to personal taste here — some people are into videos, others aren’t into it. We have veered away from videos, but we may make some to help teach people difficult techniques. When people are upset, they can only process a little — so our language and scripts have to be really short. We find it easier to have many chat bubbles with 1 or 2 lines — we try to keep it lean and bouncy. There’s almost a rhythm to it — there are a few flows where we can capture help."

"Some users want to be served something else. We always issue an invitation to engage in a conversation. There’s no assumption people want help. Some people just want to chat, they don’t want help. So we try not to explicitly ask people what they are looking for. There really isn’t a lot of open chat away from buttons in Woebot. People may want a past video or lesson."

"The only strategy that we’ve done is press — that has been reasonably successful. Interestingly, we got far more conversations as a result of blog article reviews than mainstream press. Bloggers just seem to find us. The tongue and cheek name helped and launching with data and the study helped. Some of the other mental health bots are less than useful and possibly dangerous — so having actual data from a study was important."

"The first is to just ask people if they want to converse. I’m not sure if we’ve nailed the invitation. Some of our push navigations were like “beep boop” — we are trying to understand the re-triggering schedule. [Note: Checking in to see what someone’s mental health is is a great reason to re-engage — Woebot naturally does this.]"

"It was a nice to have a paywall at first to get validation that people would pay for it. We had a decent conversion rate, but I wanted to gather data. Direct to consumer will be the longer term model. People were emailing us saying this is less expensive than our therapist; they were the ones who valued us the most. Convenience was a huge value proposition."

"It’s all completely de-identified and anonymized data — nobody in the company can ever see anyone’s Facebook profile. It was to protect the user and to protect us. The guiding principle is transparency. There is no open ended generative conversation — everything is scripted. We want to launch an app to have more privacy."

"We use AWS Lambda and NodeJS. Our app will have an animated Woebot tied to NLP that can respond to verbal language with animation. We do our analytics in house as we move to HIPAA compliance for our apps. We don’t want a 3rd party looking at data. We built a dashboard over the summer. It’s hard to find really good data scientists and AI people, and Android engineers."

"We are planning an iOS and Android app so people have extra privacy and to be HIPAA-compliant. There’s a good reason to keep it with text and to NOT do it in voice. You cannot see a negative thought in voice, but in a text chatbot you write it out and this externalization helps you overcome it. Messenger was a great launch platform — they make it easy to create and launch a bot. Users loved our prototypes there and we decided to launch there as it was easy."

"I really like ParentSpark — it helps parents with parenting. Their storytelling is great. It’s a mom coaching her kids and they help you as a parent. I also like Jeyant for medical screening; they have over a million users and screen for Zika and other diseases. PullString has done some nice character-based chatbots like Dr. Who. The Mabu chatbot, with eyes that follow you, is neat and I think IDEO designed it."

"I will always be thankful for Dr seta for using his experience and for allowing and trusting me during my initiation in the field of surgery."

"There was a need for a national to continue neurosurgery services in the country so I joined so the could train me further."

"I’ve learned to take time to enjoy the small moments in life. The little smiles or gurgles from my baby, Olivia, can make my entire day. It’s important to find those kinds of moments at work, in your marriage or with your friends. It’s all about the small things in life."

"I usually wake up with the baby between 4 and 5 a.m. I feed her and I try to sneak in a ½ hour nap before I have to get up. I get ready to go to the hospital by around 7 a.m. I either go directly to the operating room or I see patients in the office. Some days I get called in to Fox to talk about a breaking news story or study."

"Maybe any entity significantly smarter than a human being would be crippled by existential despair."

"Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, is a powerful illumination of how we really behave toward animals."

"Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy"

"While there may be similarities here and there, my child doesn’t sense, act, or learn the way a machine does."

"The machine like the djinnee, which can learn and can make decisions on the basis of its learning, will in no way be obliged to make such decisions as we should have made, or will be acceptable to us.” —Norbert Wiener, mathematician and philosopher"

"Where my beasts of their own wrong without my will and knowledge break into another’s close, I shall be punished, for I am the trespasser with my beasts.” —Anonymous case during the reign of Henry VII"

"It may seem preposterous today to hold a robot morally accountable for its actions, but there are already glimpses of this in how we talk about robot-caused harm—in ways that risk assigning them more agency than appropriate."

"I sometimes think that, in the desperate straits of humanity today, we would be grateful to have nonhuman friends, even if they are only the friends we build ourselves." —Isaac Asimov, Robot Visions"

"The military wasn’t equipped to deal with people’s demand for information about their beloved pups."

"All of my work focuses on the idea that we need to keep a boundary between humans and robots. But Google is blurring the lines with this voice. It opens the door to unethical applications. The voice is what’s easiest to imitate for the moment, from a technological standpoint. It’s possible to trick the person who doesn’t know who they’re communicating with. You can make someone say things they never said. You can even make the dead speak. It’s a breach of trust."

"As soon as we hear a machine speak, it’s implied that the machine understands. That it has the capacity of a human. Which is not the case. For example Sophia from Hanson Robotics speaks in a way that is semantically coherent but she is following a script, she’s absolutely not autonomous, she has no desires or intentions. She’s a marionette. Engineers have given her a scripted dialog. Machine learning allows for learning from data, but without understanding. This machine has nothing to do yet with a living embryo."

"Yes, my point of view is utilitarian and functional. Robots have a lot to offer us. When I see the percentage of the population that will be elderly in the next few years, it’s clear that we won’t have enough working people to look after them. So it could be interesting to have a robot in charge of monitoring these people when they are at the end of their lives for example. So robots are useful but we have to be aware that they should complement humans and not replace humans."

"The goal is not to replace the human. The machine is, for the moment, incapable of this. Our robots are not very precise yet. We are making more cognitive advances than physical ones. Mechatronics are going to need a lot more research. Making entirely humanoid robots remains complicated."

"We first need a certain set of ethics for designers, which is why researchers are in the loop. Then we need to give people the ability to understand the system they’re using. I’m part of a nudging project that aims to explain gently to people. We’ll also need to teach robotics at school so children can have perspective when it comes to questions of artificial intelligence and robotics. And then we’ll need legal rules. In the same way that there’s a committee who decides whether a medicinal product is put on the market or not, we’ll need an ethical committee who validates a robot or not before its market launch. But not everything should be constrained by ethical reasoning. We can do business that’s ethical and responsible. When I say ethics, I’m not talking about philosophy. I’m talking about making machines that respect our values. We have to ask ourselves how these new robots harbor a danger for humans and accordingly how we can regulate it."

"AI will be disruptive, but will ultimately provide opportunities."

"We understand ethics when it comes to data, this is why we need the new GDPR regulations. But when it comes to co-evolution with machines we aren’t talking about what changes it will lead to in terms of inter-human relations. Psychiatrists are interested in this question but the world of technology isn’t yet. Certain manufacturers I work with such as Softbank Robotics [who make the robots Pepper and Nao] are starting to understand the idea of ethics. But we still need to find a compromise between ethics and business. We need to agree together on a system of human values that will be respected by the robots who interact with us."

"Each country has its own values and robots should comply with the values of the country they are in, kind of like labor laws."

"Yes, I think that this is where Europe and also the United States can make a difference. Maybe the price will be the main argument for someone buying a robot. But maybe there will also be an ethical aspect that will influence their choice of one robot over another. For this we need to make ethics “fashionable”."

"Firstly, it is unconscionable to want to try to reproduce a human as we can easily deceive and manipulate. Here I am targeting for example Google Home and Sophia. Next we must be careful with attachment and empathy. If we live with machines all the time, there will be consequences on our relationships with others. Then there will be a division between those who have access to this technology and understand it and those who don’t. We are widening the gap of technological inequality, and long-term it’s anti-democratic."

"I suggest a COP [conference of parties] be held on artificial intelligence. It is urgent that we take an interest in the repercussions of what we’re doing. It’s our responsibility!"

"If you use the internet and apps, they work on automated decision making based on what’s there, and they’ve been doing that for decades, so AI is not something new. The question we need to be asking from this story is What kind of information is inside these systems? They can be used to connect us and build and improve our worlds, but at the same time, they can be very scary and can be used to drive hate."

"We need to understand that if we don’t have controls, or don’t understand what is really going on, AI just becomes some of us, it can be used for nefarious means, and doesn’t represent our ideals, our values, and the things that we want in our societies."

"Representation matters in building these AI systems, if we don’t build in what we want, then they don’t represent us."

"Part of my work at the Ecumenical Documentation and Information Centre for Eastern and Southern Africa was to organise training workshops in documentation techniques."

"I collaborated with a Rome based NGO, the International Documentation Centre (IDOC). Through IDOC I made contact with Interdoc, and in December 1987 a Dutch Interdoc member came to Zimbabwe and demonstrated the use of modems and email at a workshop. Subsequently we included email and modem training in all our workshops. We supplied our group with modems, and astonishingly, at least 5% managed to stay connected using long distance modem to modem connections until, by the early 1990s, they could use the far easier and cheaper Fidonet networks established through the Economic Commission for Africa, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and APC."

"What motivated me to spend the last ten years spreading access to the network is that I’ve always felt that there was not much point in having the content there if a lot of people can’t use it. We are slowly getting there.The internet is beginning to pervade, and capital cities of Africa now at least have some degree of access, but that’s not good enough yet. We still have to bring it further out so that people in rural areas have access."

"The activity displayed by the bishop-viceroy was astonishing, and seemed to be transmitted to all departments of the government."

"The reign of this ecclesiastic was remarkable for nothing except its extraordinarily brief duration."

"I’ve been writing a memoir, and it’s a project that has been ongoing for a couple of years, I felt like it’s related to the current moment. I had published another piece with the L.A. Review of Books, and I thought I would share my experience. I sent it to them, and it didn’t even take them an hour to say yes.”"

"When you lose contact with the world, whether it is social contact or being in our homes, we kind of start floating mentally, psychologically, and otherwise, I use the notion of anchoring because in the same way ships and boats anchor themselves in the sea, we need to anchor ourselves into the reality of the world. There is life going on, a world that we need to connect to. Anchoring covers all of these different aspects relating to the world outside."

"Yes, life as a political prisoner is a much more gruesome experience, but what makes the current moment so dramatic is the scale of it,There seems to be no end in sight, and the uncertainty of it is a big part. In my situation, I didn’t know when I was going to be released. I had a very different political view from the government. I wasn’t involved in violent activity or anything like that. I was imprisoned for my thoughts, and there wasn’t a sentence. They never told me until the very last moment when I would be released, and that created a lot of pain and angst."

"Kimberly Williams-Paisley - Cammie Raleigh"

"LeAnn Rimes - Dixie Bennings"