Here’s what you can do with Microsoft ‘Murphy’ – you can chat with it using popular messaging platforms like Skype, Telegram & Facebook Messenger; ask it to cook up weird combinations of a celebrity’s or famous person’s face mixed with other celebrities bodies, & make funny hodgepodge picture combinations with other random features of places, animals & things.
Microsoft’s 1st foray into artificial intelligence (AI) bots didn’t go so well. Its Tay bot was headline fodder when it was famously tricked into responding with racist remarks, & promoting drug use, so was finally retired. Murphy’s makers, however, are taking quite a different approach with their bot & want to make it exclusively about fun & making funny pictures, thereby avoiding any possible hint of controversy.
Project Murphy is the result of an internal Microsoft team development effort which started in late 2015 & was originally focused on ‘HowOldRobot’ to determine how old you’d look in the future based on an uploaded image. As they state on their project page, the team moved on to provide the bot with a “What-If” functionality – what if the bot could have an imagination? This devolved into a bot that used machine learning to create imaginative images based on the what-if questions that it was being asked.
Tech from a bunch of other Microsoft projects was enlisted to help build Murphy, most importantly the Cortana Intelligence Suite & its MS Cognitive Services, Bing Image Search, the MS Bot Framework, as well as Azure Stream Analytics, PowerBI & Azure Data Lake. With these pieces, the team aims to hitch a ride onto the new wave of apps based on machine learning by bringing it together with human interaction. They want to augment human ability with that of machines & to make the apps trustworthy & respectful & at any user’s beck & call.
To provide for privacy, Murphy will store the photos that you upload & that it generates for 10 minutes, max & then deletes them.
Some fun examples of Murphy’s results are provided in the product page, such as: What if Charlie Chaplin had a long beard?, What if Marilyn Monroe was the Mona Lisa?, or What if Albert Einstein was Beethoven?
- This post is merely a startup profile based on publicly available information & not a review. -
Image Credit: Microsoft
•Share This•
