Converge | The Verge

Bots didn’t flop; they just became invisible

2018-08-15T10:17:15-04:00

The hype cycle for bots exploded in 2016 as developers poured time and money into the dream of personal digital assistants. Facebook and Microsoft announced major investments into conversational user interfaces, and Slack launched a fund to capitalize on the bots hoping to build on its platform.

But when bots became available the public, the public largely shrugged. The advantages of conversational interfaces paled next to their drawbacks. It turned out that typing into text boxes - often while trying to guess the appropriate commands - felt frustrating compared to the visual interfaces people were used to. And so bots largely receded into …

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Pandora’s podcast genome project could launch by the end of the year

2018-08-09T13:32:25-04:00

Breaking down music into its component parts helped Pandora build personalized music playlists years before services like Spotify even existed. Could taking a similar approach with podcasts help the streaming-audio company regain the users it has lost to newer services? That's the bet Pandora is making under Roger Lynch, who joined the company as CEO in 2017.

Announced earlier this year, the podcast genome project is designed to help users find podcasts to listen to based on the characteristics of each show. "Pandora created personalized music discovery - that doesn't exist in podcasts," Lynch says. "You might look at a chart, you might see …

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Lyft might build a ‘zen mode’ to let drivers know you don’t feel like chatting

2018-07-25T06:00:04-04:00

Ride-sharing apps are a godsend, but they sometimes come at a cost that goes beyond the $8 or $10 you spent to get home from the club. Chatty drivers can turn every ride into an awkward simulacrum of a first date. Where are you from? How long have you lived here? What do you do for work?

Of course, many of these icebreakers lead to great conversations. I genuinely enjoy chatting with the incredibly nice people who are taking time out of their day to drive me, on demand, to a place of my choosing. And yet sometimes it's 4:30 in the morning, and I'm headed to the airport for work, and all I really want to do is close my eyes and go to sleep - …

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Why tech nonprofits are increasingly stepping in for the government

2018-07-18T09:36:47-04:00

The Trump administration's massive cuts to social services have left lots of people in need, and that has created fresh work for tech nonprofits that are hoping to address it.

"The nonprofit sector is doing a lot of the work the government should be doing," said Tiffani Ashley Bell, founder of the Human Utility, which provides debt forgiveness for people with overdue water bills. "And there is a lot of that in the nonprofit sector." Bell founded the organization working to restore water service to people who are unable to pay their bills. The organization, which was founded in 2014, began its work in Detroit and has since expanded to Baltim …

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This is just a very good pitch for an Airbnb for horses

2018-07-11T09:08:38-04:00

Alexia Bonatsos has watched countless startups come and go. First as the editor-in-chief of TechCrunch, and now in her current role as the founder of venture capital firm Dream Machine, Bonatsos' job has been to understand what makes a tech company succeed. "A lot of it's gut, but gut's not magical woo-woo dust," she says. "It's taking in data and information and eventually making a decision based on that."

Bonatsos has seen thousands of companies, and so on today's episode of Converge, we turned the tables. Using two decks of cards - one with a set of famous companies and the other with a set of random nouns - we invited Bonatsos to draw t …

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Slack didn’t kill email — and it might have made it stronger

2018-07-06T12:20:15-04:00

It's been four years now since Slack arrived to kill email - and yet, email persists. While the group chat app has plenty of ardent fans and continues to grow quickly, it also draws criticism for its distracting, always-on nature. At many workplaces, if you're at work, you're also expected to be available on Slack. For some people, that means the thing that "replaced" email is something much more demanding.

Mathilde Collin says the workplaces of the future ought to take a different approach. She's the co-founder and CEO of Front, which makes tools for sharing inboxes with your teammates. If you've ever emailed a business address starting wi …

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Twitch’s rise shows how social networks usually succeed on accident

2018-06-27T06:00:01-04:00

It hasn't even been four years since Amazon bought Twitch.tv, the live-streaming platform that has become the primary destination for broadcasting the playing of video games. Since then, the service has grown to 15 million daily users, with the average person watching 106 minutes per day. In hindsight, it's no wonder that Amazon was willing to pay $1 billion to snap up Twitch - but for a long time, it was an open question whether anyone would buy it at all.

Twitch began life as Justin.tv, a web-based live broadcasting platform. As venture capitalist Mike Maples Jr. of Floodgate Capital tells us on this week's episode of Converge, it wasn't …

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How science fiction is training us to ignore the real threats posed by AI

2018-06-20T13:09:12-04:00

CEOs of artificial intelligence companies usually seek to minimize the threats posed by AI, rather than play them up. But on this week's episode of Converge, Clara Labs co-founder and CEO Maran Nelson tells us there is real reason to be worried about AI - and not for the reasons that science fiction has trained us to expect.

Movies like Her and Ex Machina depict a near future in which anthropomorphic artificial intelligences manipulate our emotions and even commit violence against us. But threats like Ex Machina's Ava will require several technological breakthroughs before they're even remotely plausible, Nelson says. And in the meantime, a …

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How Firefox is using Pocket to try to build a better news feed than Facebook

2018-06-13T12:02:20-04:00

On this week's episode of Converge, Pocket founder and CEO Nate Weiner tells us why he sold his company to Mozilla, and how he's working to build a better version of Facebook's News Feed into the Firefox browser. Pocket, which lets you save articles and videos you find around the web to consume later, now has a home inside Firefox as the engine powering recommendations to 50 million people a month. By analyzing the articles and videos people save into Pocket, Weiner believes the company can show people the best of the web - in a personalized way - without building an all-knowing, Facebook-style profile of the user.

"We're testing this reall …

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Google’s Mark Risher tells us why everything we know about passwords is wrong

2018-06-06T06:00:02-04:00

On this week's episode of Converge, Google's Mark Risher tells us why the conventional wisdom about choosing your password is wrong and about the expanding number of threats faced by platforms like Gmail as they work to protect users from phishing attacks and spammers. Conventional wisdom about choosing longer, more complicated passwords is getting less effective over time. Meanwhile, the people behind phishing attacks are getting much better.

Risher is a director of product management at Google, where he oversees Google's identity, account security, and counter-abuse teams. A big part of Risher's job over the years has been to fight unwant …

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