Code the City #8 took place on Sat 25th to Sunday 26th February 2017.
The weekend was an exploration of the world of chatbots and AI (or Artificial Intelligence), where participants identified problems to tackle and quickly prototyped solutions.
You can find the final presentations, with links to videos, Github repos and other goodness here.
We were so busy that we did few blogged updates this time around, so the CTC8 link only goes to two posts! (Reminder to selves – we must do better next time).
There was quite a bit of activity on via Twitter using the hashtag #codethecity. You can also view the principal GitHub repo for the weekend which points to individual project teams’ code.
Some background: what are chat bots?
A chatbot is a piece of software that interacts with a customer or user to directly answer their questions. It uses existing data or information coupled with artificial intelligence to respond in a human-like way, guiding the user to a solution.
There are many examples of live chat bots in this exciting, emerging field. A chatboat could give you travel directions, tell you when its next going to rain in your area, or help you contest parking tickets. It could book you a flight and hotel, or act as a free lawyer to help the homeless get housing . The HBO series Westworld has even launched a bot to help you interact with the (fictional) holiday park!
If you are new to this field and want to get started we suggest you read the Complete Beginners Guide to Chatbots (and some of the links at the end of this article).
How will the weekend run?
We’ll apply our usual Code The City methodology:
- Bring together a diverse range of people from various backgrounds, to form teams.
- Identify problems that we’d like to apply chatbots to solve.
- Identify approaches, information and data, to guide how we develop the bots and train them
- Mix academic thinking, and user need, with open source technology and open data to develop new services
- Iterate quickly through approaches, testing ideas, failing quickly and refining our approaches.
- Prototype and demonstrate solutions to an interested audience
Who should attend?
- Service owners – and service providers
- Academics and students in the field of chatbots and artificial intelligence
- Coders
- Data specialists
- Front-end and UX designers
- Bloggers and social media practitioners
- Anyone with an interest in getting involved in creating bots even for fun!
What you will do?
You will create mixed teams to workshop chatbot solutions to real world issues. Maybe these will building on the outputs of previous work we’ve done at CodeTheCity. Through rapid prototyping you will create new applications and have some fun in the process.
We’ll show you new techniques for service design, idea generation, prototyping, and rapid iterative application development – and you will show other participants some tricks and approaches, too. We’ll share knowledge and learning.
You might even get a Tshirt, and we can guarantee the best catering of any weekend workshop in the city!
To book a free ticket visit our Eventbrite page But be quick, tickets will go swiftly!
All attendees will get a year’s free membership of the Open Data Institute.
You can find out more about the previous events on tumblr, on the eventifier, and on flickr.
If you have any questions please get in touch.
How can I support this event?
If you are interested in sponsoring this event please, or providing other support such as access to online tools or services, please get in touch.
Useful Articles and Resources
- Chatbots Magazine
- Chatbots Aren’t A Fad – they’re a revolution
- Ten tools to build your own Chatbot.
- Building Bots for Service
- Eight Principles of Bot Design
- Chatbots – the ultimate prototyping tool.
- Introduction: Deep Learning for Chatbots, part 1 and part 2
- Eleven Examples of Conversational Commerce and Chatbots 2016
- If you are a Slack user, you can create a Slack bot to mimic your colleagues in Python.
>>> Book a ticket on our Eventbrite page
Code The City 