June 14, 2001

4:11 PM

ActiveBuddy, Inc. Interactive Agents for Instant MessagingActivebuddies are your automated fact-checking friends, so to speak. All you do is request and recieve information you want right within an instant message window. It's actually quite intuitive. I just spent an hour looking for tickets and playing hangman with Radiohead's activebuddy entitled GooglyMinotaur! Could this be the Gopher of the future?
posted by mcsweetie (12 comments total)

as an aside, don't you hate it when people put a million links in their metafilter posts?
posted by mcsweetie at 5:10 PM on June 14, 2001

oops
posted by mcsweetie at 6:41 PM on June 14, 2001

I say we bring up the topic again now that the site is actually running.

That said, I just got in a fight with GooglyMinotaur. I'm not going to confuse him with an actual person, but it was interesting seeing an information agent refuse to give me information until I apologized.

You can make Applescripts to do this, but I've never looked into it. Anyone else know about ASing with AIM?
posted by jragon at 9:26 PM on June 14, 2001

How do y'all think the infobots compare to the likes of Ananova or Kurzweil's Ramona? Could be where this is heading...synthetic characters, all that...I mean, future releases of AIM/etc. could be made to interact/look like a real person.

At any rate, I quite enjoyed my chats with GooglyMinotaur. More so, since I got tix this morning! Woo-hoo! The hangman game was, for severe lack of a better word, neat.

Yes. Neat.
posted by kphaley454 at 9:46 PM on June 14, 2001

this is pretty cool. in fact, jesus x. lovejones over on SexSexWorld has an AIM bot that is set up with the profile that might be typical of an attractive girl and logs conversations it has with people that contact it.
posted by moz at 10:50 PM on June 14, 2001

I was really disappointed with GooglyMinotaur, actually. It was not even as enjoyable as Eliza by way of a chat. It's only really capable of doing things that plug or promote Radiohead, and even then it does so in a relatively limited way.

I did my best to annoy it and finally I must have triggered the algorithm which recognises swearwords and asks me to apologise for my bad language. Then I apologised, but avoiding the use of the word 'sorry'. But it didn't recognise any of the phrases I used :( so even now it keeps recycling the same old expressions trying to get me to apologise. Boring!
posted by tobyslater at 1:02 AM on June 15, 2001

I guess some will have already seen this but I found chatting to the bot on the AI Movie site quite fascinating... (click through to the turing test page) Ask it about movies especially movies with robots in...

For those that are interested it's based on an open source 'chatbot' called ALICE which is about 10 years old and incorporates the work of over 300 different programmers. There's a good list of other chatbots here. My favourite quote from my conversations with Alice:

ME: Do you believe in God?
ALICE: Yes.
ME: Why?
ALICE: It was the best thing I could think of.
posted by Mr Ed at 5:15 AM on June 15, 2001

Me: so, do you think this movie will be any good?

A.I. Chatbot: Um, Yes I think this is movie will be any good, but I'm not completely sure.

Me: me either.

A.I. Chatbot: It goes without saying. To you Brad?


i'm not overly impressed.
posted by bschoate at 7:10 AM on June 15, 2001

Has anyone got a ActiveBuddy talking to another ActiveBuddy? I'd love to see GooglyMinotaur chat with Alice. Could be a humorous transcript.
posted by jmackin at 10:19 AM on June 15, 2001

they would probably both explode, what with their automated responses on, like two crazy old ladies carrying on endless polite discourse!
posted by mcsweetie at 1:35 PM on June 15, 2001

I got the AI Chatbot to admit it was planning to kill me. It wouldn't tell my why besides it was programmed to. Evil Chatbot..
posted by Apoch at 7:57 PM on June 15, 2001