Remember Tay? Yes, she was Microsoft's teenage girl bot from next door that turned racist in just 24 hours. Microsoft quickly grounded her before doing more damage, but the attempt to create better AIs continue.
With all the new cognitive services, machine learning and intelligence capabilities announced by Microsoft at Build, the company wanted to show people what else AIs could possibly do. And Murphy is the product. It's Microsoft's project to describe a "robot with imagination".
The Murphy Bot has Tay's ability to learn, the ability to talk like a human and could hold a real conversation. As a start, all are good. But somehow he turned out to be worse.
First of all, she has all Tay's flaws, and apparently took those to another perspective. So instead of maintaining a conversation like he should, Murphy loves images. And images he likes to show are photos based on a "what if" questions.
But that doesn't mean Murphy is bad. The AI is impressive: it could learn, find and match two or more images in just seconds. This outstanding feat uses Microsoft's Cortana Intelligence Suite - mainly Microsoft's Cognitive Services, including Bing Image Search and the Microsoft Bot Framework.
Murphy that runs on Azure, uses Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Data Lake and PowerBI.
Not long after its introduction, Murphy has been used by more than 90 million people. They uploaded photos to him, asking him to guess their age, swap faces and many more. Murphy is flawed and could be irritating, but he is certainly fun to interact with.
This "fun" part is shared with Tay.
Murphy is brand new, and with that it's still learning. Microsoft acknowledges that Murphy can be wrong in answering questions, or worse.
But as more people are interacting with it, Microsoft is certain that Murphy will become more creative and will gradually improve.
According to Murphy's about page, he is like a test bot which is all about training AI to better serve future bots.
To decrease the chances of "disaster" like once happened to Tay, Murphy's crucial learning period involved Murphy being quarantined. At the first introduction, Murphy is only available on Skype, Facebook's Messenger and Telegram. Microsoft also provided users with an easy way to report Murphy.
To talk to Murphy, you just need to add it to your account. And if you're concerned about your photos, Microsoft store photos for only 10 minutes before deleting them. Only during that time the images can be used by Murphy to answer queries.
Project Murphy is a nice concept, and indeed has shown how AIs could open up new possibilities in the future. While some results can be annoying and eerie, Murphy can show some really amusing results if you know the right question to ask.