Me + Bot = Me Bot
Chatbots are Disappointing…
Yes, today that’s true. Why? Because most are pretending to be human and that’s super hard right now. It’s going to take an insane amount of human data that currently lives in many silos to make it happen. The largest and most important silo is mostly invisible to the digital world and it’s sitting on your shoulders. It’s your mind filled with your life experiences and knowledge. Most of us don’t have a publishing imperative to write articles and produce material that Google can index.
To make matters worse, many bot builders are defining “me bot” as a personal assistant to do busy work for you. Something like a personalized query service for selfish consumption. These me bots will never interact with humans other than their masters.
…Humans are Better
We want to converse with humans, right? OK, so let’s talk to humans. Let’s talk to each other. How do we connect to each other beyond our average 650 or so social friends or 150 active phone contacts?
My team and I have had the great honor to work on Sensay, the bot that brings you humans. Sensay doesn’t pretend to be a human, it uses complex matching and routing to get to directly into a relevant human conversation. Why is conversing with humans vital? Humans can share advice and opportunities with you — inventory a bot simply does not possess.
git branch [gandhi]
“Be the bot you want to see in the world”
The best version of a “me bot” is a derivative of you. In order to achieve this personal singularity you have to start by downloading yourself to a me bot.
Why Download Yourself
Because you’re valuable. In fact, you’re the most valuable thing you own. You have a right to continue to own your intellectual property, to merchandise and sell it or share it freely with any human or bot you wish. Humanity improves overall when we can instantly harness each others’ life experiences and knowledge. We grow more interdependent and connected as a species and this fosters amity and unity in the world. But there’s another more basic direct benefit to you: Opportunity!
People way beyond your social graph need you and have amazing jobs and gigs for you
This is not just theory. Over the last 18 months, our growing Sensay community of 1.5M users have had over 500K chats specifically about jobs and gigs. 30% of them result in exchange of contact information to meet in person. We hired a key member of our team via a chat on Sensay and we recently connected with a technical candidate live on the stage at Techcrunch Disrupt. We were so excited, we bought a 20 inch gong (sourced on Sensay) on stage and rang it loudly in triumph! 15% of the total Sensay chats are about jobs and gigs and there are many other chat categories with tangible benefit to one of more of the participants. 50% of chats contain some type of commerce opportunity.
How to Download Yourself
There are a few approaches to replicating your knowledge and life experience:
Profile creation — Tell a form or a bot all about your interests, likes and dislikes. Good because you download the parts of your personality that you are most proud of first. Challenging because people have a relatively shallow self concept when you directly ask them identity questions.
Having users create a “resume” of themselves is therefore, an in effective solution in itself.
Conversational inference — Have lots of conversations with humans or bots and have the puzzle pieces fit together over time. Good because you can get at the depth of human knowledge by talking about shared experiences. Challenging because the human conversations we have online are fragmented across communication channels. The highest quality conversations we have today are with humans, but the most intimate of them happen offline and off the record.
We don’t explore the deepest recesses of our experiences online because they are part of a permanent public record.
Reverse me bot — This is a hybrid approach with all the benefits of conversational inference with light and contextual profile prompting when there are some gaps to fill. This is what we do at Sensay.
Your me bot gets formed on the back end of the platform, one chat at a time. It prompts you to fill in the gaps and you are in control of your personas.
The system relentlessly seeks similarities between users’ conversations and prompts you indirectly for verification via asking for additional details or prompting you to help on specific chats.
When you download yourself
When you become human software, you have all the benefits and challenges of software, including:
Scalability — Be everywhere and be there for everyone, anytime, even while you sleep.
Extensibility — Replicate specific containers of yourself with specialized, modular knowledge sets. These are personas or you many me-s. They come from the hats you wear in life and the tribes you belong to.
Maintainability — Correct errors in your knowledge by millions of interactions with others and others’ me bots. Upgrade your knowledge via lifelong learning and as you do so, you upgrade you ability to learn.
You also gain one key benefit not yet afforded to computer software:
Control — the right to self determination, one of the basic human rights.
Human cloud
So what do you do when there are two or more versions of you and everyone else?
Welcome to the Human Cloud
Using the computing cloud analogy, humans and their bots will form a hybrid cloud where the freshest knowledge originates with humans themselves and is replicated to their me bots.
Initially, humans will have more conversations with humans than they will with other me bots but over time, will will see a more even distribution. Eventually, you won’t be able to tell if you’re chatting with a human or a me bot and it won’t matter.
There will be way more practical purposes for conversation than administering the Turing Test — learning and unlocking opportunities
A cloud of human originated and controlled me bots will represent Artificial Intelligence done responsibly. It will be a means to extend and upgrade human capabilities to uplift instead of replace humanity.
Ariel Jalali is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sensay: One Contact with the Experience of Millions. Sensay will be releasing your own personal me bot from the data we have gathered soon. You will be besties ;)
