Virtual Assistants/Agents/Bots
Get Busy Learning How to Code Them
Sometimes I get a little exhilarated and annoyed at being so in sync with emerging discoveries without having seen or read anything out there about them. It is like there is a moment when everyone really paying attention sees the same possibilities. My students will tell you that is what happend three years ago when we set out to design the “essential web” and “knowledge net” later that decentralized Internet now mostly covers.
Well, here we go again.
Literally in the first week of changing my entire curriculum to focus fundamentally on a foundation of natural language interaction through students creating their own, open-ended AI assistants (which Gartner calls “virtual agents” and we sometimes call “text” or “chat” bots), I receive the following in my email.

The article is full of amazing statistics that completely demonstrate the world-wide shift to “conversational” interfaces, which I am sure will eventually have an acronym.
That article should be mandatory reading for every technology educator or decision maker.
It turns out this is exactly what I was experimenting with when I designed our curriculum based on observing the grassroots adoption of Discord, Slack, and other messaging apps culminating with Google Duplex, which Mark Muchane, a very forward-thinking student brought to my attention. Six months ago I was contemplating this move seeing that Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant are demonstrating how we can overcome our low output bandwidth with voice.
There is a solid, important future based on natural language, conversational interfaces that fundamentally requires understanding this type of coding—and above all—regular expressions. If you are not teaching/learning them, you are not preparing for the future of most user interface development.
