Fascinating to see the medium affecting the media. This article describes how news organizations are working on tailoring their product specifically for the smart speaker audience, starting by making their briefings smaller. Anything to catch up with the Weather and Music skill frontrunners! How would you tailor the news for the Smart Speaker?

The “Duh” heard ‘round the world. We’ve been saying this since day 1: that publishers would never be successful just repurposing an RSS feed in a chat bubble. That’s not to say publishers can’t be successful with bots--they absolutely can, offering their content in an intuitively queryable interface that serves up their curation when and how you need it (imagine being in Lisbon and being able to just *ask* conde nast traveler where to grab lunch right now vs. having to google your way through articles). Unfortunately--as this article puts it in one sort of throw-away comment, that’s not really possible “without much work on the part of the company's social media manager.” That’s just the thing--creating meaningful conversational experiences would require a pretty significant shift in how publishers operate and the division between editorial and ad. If only all these pubs could take a page out of Quartz...

And in your Weekend Long Read, take a read through this wonderful article about how AI is popping up, well, everywhere, and already influencing human behavior, e.g. “My daughter is 22 months old now. At 9 months she said her first word, which was the dog’s name, and then at 13 months she learned to walk, and then by 15 months she started giving Alexa commands.” Also really underscores what we always say: the objective of a bot is to provide a service, not to pass a Turing test. 

Speaking of not passing the Turing Test, this sideshow freak definitely is not. Read this article and take a trip down the uncanny valley!

No plans tonight and like Comedy? Check out Reply.ai’s co-founder at “Startup Late Night" live in NYC with Mary Lemmer. Not in NYC? Check the website for the livestream!