Have you heard the one about the Norwich tech firm and the monkey?
Ubisend, based at Whitespace in St James Mill, has built an artificial intelligence (AI) chat bot of the PG Tips mascot Monkey for Unilever's Comic Relief campaign.
The consumables giant wanted to do something unusual with one of its most famous brands and decided on a chat bot which led to the link with Ubisend. The team were given the brief of bringing Monkey to life by enabling it to respond to people on Facebook Messenger in a conversational manner and to tell one million jokes. Ubisend managing director Dean Withey said: 'It is a great project for us to make a name for ourselves but also a really fun project to bring such a well-known character to life.'
Part of the challenge has been training the AI to respond to different variations of phrases to give a realistic impression of conversation.
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