Microsoft partners with Reddit for some crowdsourced wisdom

Unless you've been living under a rock, Reddit should be pretty familiar. With more than 330 million users and about 2.8 million comments posted daily, the Reddit community is very engaged and vocal and the site as a whole reams with information about almost anything under the sun. Therefore, it is a reserve of crowdsourced information and analyzing patterns in the data is a herculean task. At the Everyday AI event yesterday in San Francisco, Reddit CEO, Alexis Ohanian, revealed that they are partnering with Microsoft to leverage their expertise in Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Reddit will leverage two key AI technologies — the Bing Intelligent Search and Power BI. Intelligent Search will incorporate Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) and other Reddit content into search results while Power BI solution templates provide business intelligence that enables marketers and content creators to see how the Reddit community is engaging with their content. Searching for a subreddit in Bing will now show the top threads in that subreddit in the search results. Initially, the following experiences have been launched, with more to follow. According to Microsoft —

• While already in Bing, when you search for a specific Reddit topic or subreddit, like “Reddit Aww”, Bing will surface a sneak peak of the topic with the top conversations for the day from Reddit.  
• When searching for a general topic that is best answered with relevant Reddit conversations, Bing will surface a snippet of those conversations at the top of the page so you can easily get perspectives from the millions of Reddit users. 
• Bing will be the place to go to search for Reddit AMAs, Q&As with celebrities and every day heroes hosted by the Reddit community. On Bing you can discover AMA schedules and see snapshots of AMAs that have already been completed. Simply search a person’s name to see their AMA snapshot or search for “Reddit AMAs” to see a carousel of popular AMAs.  

Ohanian opines that Reddit's huge repository of crowdsourced information is a valuable asset to Bing and Microsoft's AI tools will help Reddit make sense of all this data in a much better way. More features and refinements to existing ones will be added based on user feedback.

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