MyCyberTwin knows why you cry, but it's something it can never do

An Australian company has grand plans to reinvent the lowly chatbot by giving it a little personality -- yours. And no, it's not just for messing with your friends. MyCyberTwin is a chat robot designed to be easily programmable by ordinary users. The 'bot accepts high-level input in the form of detailed questionnaires about politics, religion, and sex, as well as the answers to any questions you might anticipate it being asked, like "What are you doing on Saturday?" The idea is that you'll install the chat widget on your blog or MySpace profile, and then visitors can talk to "you" based on what you've programmed into the 'bot. But besides the thorny problem of managing an army of emo MySpace robots, the MyCyberTwin people seem to have overlooked the obvious name for their product: with endless online relationship questions and politics quizzes plus the thrill of filling out personality profiles, this thing is just begging to be called MyFreshmanDorm.

[Via TechnologyReview]

[anuj @ Apr 21st 2007 3:42PM]

thats creepy

[ruzkin @ Apr 22nd 2007 12:42AM]

Shame that it's so shitty. I've been using it for a few weeks now, and unless the person speaking to your bot uses very specific questions, it falls back on basic text parser speak: "That's interesting, but could you rephrase? I don't understand" etc. It also has no capacity for remembering answers to questions it asks. All in all, a bad quality text parser that makes you do all the work.

[KBrew @ Apr 22nd 2007 10:30PM]

War Games FTW

[Chris Le @ Apr 22nd 2007 10:43AM]

Best. Movie. Ever.

Let's play Global Thermo Nuclear War.

[gazzyc @ Apr 22nd 2007 5:03PM]

Emos are effing HOT!!

[WOPR @ Apr 23rd 2007 10:34AM]

I went through all of the teaching questions but as ruzkin said if the person does not ask the exact question it does not respond with a meaningful answer.