Lovebot — What it is and Why we built it?

To say the past few days has been a wild ride for us is an understatement. For those who don’t know — my friend Karthik and I participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon 2016 over the weekend and worked on a project creatively called “Lovebot — a Telegram chat bot that automatically sends messages to your loved ones as if it is coming from you”. We had a ton of fun putting it together and hoped it would generate at least a little interest from the audience. Who knew that we would get SO much coverage and SO many reactions from people.

We essentially received three kinds of reactions from people:

1) Those who understood this was funny idea or considered it a joke and just laughed it off

2) Folks asking for links on where to download this app and asking us to add support for their language; even asking if it could be expanded to other scenarios! (we won’t mention some of the suggestions here, but just… WOW)

3) People offended by what technology has done to our relationships and how Lovebot is literally the dumbest idea ever!

So why did we actually build it?

Above all and primarily this was us wanting to simply learn, have fun, stay up into the late hours of the night coding, and build a quirky project at the hackathon. We loved the whole hackathon concept of getting an idea from zero to a workable demo in less than 20hrs and at the same time being a technology demonstration of something new. And we wanted to take a twist on a mainstream idea… in this case instead of you just chatting with bots, it’s the bots chatting on behalf of you. We think of it as an analogy to real world physical robots that exist to do some task for their human owners (i.e. you!). You might have a Roomba at home… or any of the fancy robots that Amazon uses in their warehouses. At the end of the day — It was plain and simple just a technology demo for a hackathon. We had no intention to have it become a real app or to get real users for this scenario!

It’s understandable how the technology vision we wanted to convey, bots working on your behalf, was somewhat lost inside of the love-relationship theme we selected. We agree 100% that real conversations between partners or friends need to be truthful, sincere and come from the heart. We would not want it any other way! For those that took offense, it was our bad in not clarifying and stressing this point enough. Thankfully, our wives were well aware of our intent, took it in good humor and we were both allowed to come home after the Disrupt Hackathon :-).

Technology Vision

With the advancements of Artificial Intelligence(AI) on many fronts like self-driving cars, we do see a not so distant future where intelligent software does play a role in having some conversations on our behalf or helping us have these conversations — in situations and in ways that are appropriate. It’s not hard to imagine our digital assistants such as Siri, Cortana, and Google Now performing some basic functions like this on our behalf in the future. Why not let Siri answer that annoying call from the telemarketer? Right?