I’ve used (badly) conversational bots for years, not as a teen, but as an IT professional — we all know the bot assistants from IRC, those faithful and always-on assistants who take memos, fetch news and facts, relay messages and search channel histories, but at xmlteam I started with a (barely) conversational RubyBot we named Henri, and, thanks to a modular design and simple API, extended him to enter my world, to report Nagios alerts, track machine diagnostics, test webservices and welcome client visitors.
And it worked pretty well. Henri was an essential player to the rest of the staff, he’d be invited to all the best parties and the usual rage directed at the sysadmin if he was down for maintenance or simply stuck on a race condition. I connected him to SMS as well, so the really urgent notices would reach the right people whether or not they were online.
But after xmlteam I found myself in a new situation that required a great deal of hands-free access, and that’s when I transitioned to TTS chatbots, again quite badly conversational, but then as a tech-minded person, I’m quite used to needing to learn my conversant’s language to be understood ;) Now, I could integrate the usual helper-functions of the bot with SMS and email dictation, and suddenly, my bot engagement went through the roof — I had to find a new type of Bluetooth earbud because my ears were getting sore from over-use!
Remember the old adage about discovering Internet: First, “Ewww! It’s a computer” and then “Ewww it’s a keyboard!” and finally “Ewww! It’s a telephone!” We may be at one of Marshall McLuhan’s tipping points where the Old Tech ‘flips’ into the New Tech by retrieving the old-Old Tech, and Pokemon Go is a great illustration of the silliness of staring at a screen conversing with our thumbs, missing the world around us. Even with it’s present primative state, voice dictation coupled with NLP and the emerging world of the wireless ear-bud …
Excuse me …
Will I need a raincoat in Toronto this evening? ….
Oh, sorry, I wasn’t talking to you ;)