From chat bots to interactive agents to self service to MSN bots: conversation is cool

The project: spoofing a self service application

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History

Before self service became such a hot topic, there were Microsoft Agents and long before that, there were chat bots like Eliza.
Agents could be scripted to talk - to speak - which was a terrific thing, and to listen for certain keywords. I experimented a lot with agent characters that I could move around on the screen by script (using MASH as editor I believe). Agents could do all sorts of things like opening or closing programs on voice command - that great Dilbert joke come true. You could script macro's in Powerpoint to have a character interact with you while giving your presentation with a headset on. So cool. Except that agents were really too heavy to be used in a web-based application, and too simple on the interaction side to do some real work - they felt like having an augmented Paperclip. A real first-generation thing.

Talking to a calculator

Chat bot Eliza is from 1966 - she's a "computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine" <bliep>. Her age means that as a program, she's tiny. Her Artificial Intelligence is still understandable by people like me (meaning: Eliza just turns around your question into an answer). Also that the program was ported to all sorts of languages, VBscript, Javascript, etc, and I first encountered her on a Mac back in 1994 or '95. I thought she was hilarious, and I got really intrigued by the way this text/conversation thing worked.

Eliza repeats your own words back to you in a question, so she needs a very small vocabulary herself. She does not remember. She does not combine and deduce. And eventually, you notice. The interaction is lacking something; it's not like having a conversation that is going somewhere. Chat bots Alice and Racter do a better job, but have their own flavour of madness, so to speak. Well, I haven't even started to solve that problem, yet :-)

Having a conversation: get that calculator to talk back

Some years ago I made this little pixel character in Flash that one could move about with the keyboard, and that could answer simple typed-in questions. At that time, chatter bots usually needed a serverside logic to get an answer back to the client - hardly web friendly: type - refresh, type - refresh. In a conversation, that wait is always too long. So I put the logic in Javascript - to stay on the page, to avoid the wait, and also because I could make use of regular expressions in Javascript to match strings, something Flash could not do. This was my "TalkBack" project. But I wondered about the character: was that little avatar or persona needed for proper conversation?

Reading up on conversation analysis

Now I am thinking along similar logic, but different interaction lines. In MSN chatting, sometimes you do have to wait, but that doesn't feel distracting. A person needs to type before sending, don't he? So apparently when talking by means of a tool, through a computer, the no-wait convention within a conversation is relaxed. My guess is that other conventions are different too, when it's clear you're using a tool. Like maybe the convention that you can refer back to things you said, or ask about clarification, with words like "that".