Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, May 12

• What happened when a professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant: To help with his class this spring, a Georgia Tech professor hired Jill Watson, a teaching assistant unlike any other in the world. Throughout the semester, she answered questions online for students, relieving the professor’s overworked teaching staff. But, in fact, Jill Watson was an artificial intelligence bot. Ashok Goel, a computer science professor, did not reveal Watson’s true identity to students until after they’d turned in their final exams. Students were amazed. “I feel like I am part of history because of Jill and this class!” wrote one in the class’s online forum. “Just when I wanted to nominate Jill Watson as an outstanding TA in the CIOS survey!” said another. Now Goel is forming a business to bring the chatbot to the wider world of education. While he doesn’t foresee the chatbot replacing teaching assistants or professors, he expects the chatbot’s question-answering abilities to be an invaluable asset for massive online open courses, where students often drop out and generally don’t receive the chance to engage with a human instructor. With more human-like interaction, Goel expects online learning could become more appealing to students and lead to better educational outcomes. At the start of this semester Goel provided his students with a list of nine teaching assistants, including Jill, the automated question and answering service Goel developed with the help of some of his students and IBM. Goel and his teaching assistants receive more than 10,000 questions a semester from students on the course’s online forum. Sometimes the same questions are asked again and again. Last spring he began to wonder if he could automate the burden of answering so many repetitive questions. As Goel looked for a technology that could help, he settled on IBM Watson, which he had used for several other projects. Watson, an artificial intelligence system, was designed to answer questions, so it seemed like a strong fit. To train the system to answer questions correctly, Goel fed it forum posts from the class’s previous semesters. This gave Jill an extensive background in common questions and how they should be answered. Goel tested the system privately for months, having his teaching assistants examine whether Jill’s answers were correct. Initially the system struggled with similar questions such as “Where can I find assignment two?” and “When is assignment two due?” Goel tweaked the software, adding more layers of decision-making to it. Eventually Jill reached the point where its answers were good enough. The system is only allowed to answer questions if it calculates that it is 97 percent or more confident in its answer. Goel found that was the threshold at which he could guarantee the system was accurate. There are many questions Jill can’t handle. Those questions were reserved for human teaching assistants. Goel plans to use Jill again in a class this fall, but will likely change its name so students have the challenge of guessing which teaching assistant isn’t human.

• Cowen: It Looks Even More Like Amazon Will Become America's Top Clothing Retailer in 2017: It's been a tough few weeks for retailers, and today is no different. But there is one exception: Amazon.com Inc. Whereas XRT, the SPDR S&P Retail ETF is down over 4 percent,  Amazon shares are up over 2 percent. One driver of the retail selloff is Macy's, whose earnings report sent shares tumbling this morning after the retailer cut profit forecasts and missed analyst estimates on revenue. That's the opposite of what happened to Amazon last week when the web giantblew past analyst estimates. Given this recent action in the retail space, analysts at Cowen and Company are reiterating their call for Amazon to displace Macy's as the number one U.S. apparel retailer by next year. "[Our calculation] implies a gain in U.S. Apparel & Accessories market share from 5 percent to 14 percent," the team, led by John Blackledge write in their note, adding, "We have seen a continued shift away from more traditional retailers...In the first quarter of 2016, Amazon Apparel purchasers were up ~19 percent year-over-year, while Apparel purchasers fell ~1 percent year-over-year and ~5 percent year-over-year at Wal-Mart and Target, respectively." The team previously made this call in July of 2015, saying they were confident that Macy's would lose its top spot within two years. Looking at revenue from electronics and general merchandise at Amazon, the trend is obvious. Amazon has seen continued growth in its retail business with the expansion of its Prime offerings. Their stock prices have certainly reflected these trends. Amazon is up 65 percent over the past year, whiles Macy's is down more than 50 percent. 

• Google’s answer to Amazon's Echo is code-named ‘Chirp’ and is landing soon: A product team at Google is working on a hardware device that would integrate Google's search and voice assistant technology, akin to the Amazon Echo, Recode has learned. Google's device will resemble its OnHub wireless router, according to several sources. We don't know if it has a name yet, but internally the project goes by "Chirp." Google declined to comment. The Information previously reported that Google was plotting a competing version of Echo, a portable speaker with voice assistant tech. Sources said the device is unlikely to launch next week at Google's I/O developer conference, but plans are for it to land at some point this year. We should, however, get a peek at it and its potential next week — voice search and intelligent personal assistance will occupy center stage at the company's splash show, along with virtual reality. Google has long had voice assistant tech in its Android phones — beckoned by the words "Okay, Google" — that many in the industry see as leading the pack. (People inside Google think so, too.) But it has yet to bake that into the home, a key growing marketing for Google and its rivals. Its OnHub router, released last summer, does not have voice recognition capabilities. Amazon, on the other hand, has moved headlong into the home with Echo. One analyst estimated that Amazon has sold three million units. And Echo is collecting the type of data — what consumers search for, listen to and buy, and how they talk to machines — that Google loves. Amazon has long been considered a big threat to Google's core business as web and mobile app users go to the online retailer for product searches.