Microsoft's CaptionBot AI misses the big picture

Microsoft has let lose another AI experiment. I'm Bridget Carey this is your c net update. Microsoft artificially Intelligent chat bot, Tay, is still in time-out after misbehaving on Twitter. But that isn't stopping Microsoft in its quest to create systems that can interpret language and images. And so the company released another AI program into the wild. It's called CaptionBot. You upload a photo into CaptionBot and within seconds Microsoft analyzes it and creates a description. Sometimes it gets the description perfect but as we found out through testing there's still a lot of work to do. It didn't understand basic things like a baseball field A tree, or the shame of a Starfleet captain. To the machine, this man in a Catwoman suit is a man with a surfboard. And this scene with an alien, well, it's nothing to be scared of. It's just a man brushing his teeth. And when we put in a picture of its sibling, Tay, why that's just a cell phone he/she? You can try it yourself at captionbot.ai, and speaking of weird things on the internet, the Vine mobile app has a new feature to keep you entranced and watching videos longer. A new watch button on a profile will play through all of someone's six second videos back to back. Now normally, videos just keep looping until you scroll past them. But you know what if you feel like you're mobile life is just getting boring, that you're stuck in the same app checking rot day after day, well Sharp created a phone that can change your life. Say hello to Robohon, a little humanoid robot, smartphone pet. It starts shipping next month on May 26 and you take this little buddy with you wherever go. When you have a call, you have to talk into him Or turn him around and talk to his ****. It runs on Android but I don't think of how much use for normal apps with this fella. He'll read your messages aloud so everyone can hear your conversations. It projects videos from its head, takes photos with its face and it baby sits your infants and I guess it could also serve as a therapist to treat depression. I don't understand this ad. But the point is it'll cost you that $18,000 to own the eight inch tall RoBoHoN. At that price, hope you get a good case for it. That's all for this tech news roundup and you can head to cnet.com for the latest. From our studios in New York, I'm Bridget Carey.