You've seen the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back, right? The one where Domhnall Gleeson dies in a car crash and his wife Hayley Atwell resurrects him in digital form by using a computer program that reads all his emails and instant messages, thus replicating his exact language?
Well, a programmer has taken this idea and is running with it - without the freakish robot lookalike.
Irene Chang was attending the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in New York earlier this month when she came up for the idea of a ChatBot that would provide a solution for the incessant conversation requests of her Facebook friends.
In order to counter the need to chirp along with relentless group conversations, Chang used computer systems Cisco Spark and IBM Watson to help develop a bot that will learn your conversation style - from your favourite phrases to use of specific emoji. Once the bot learns your "voice", it can then reply to conversations in a manner that would make others think its you.
Now, given that this working concept was created in a day, it's perhaps unsurprising that Chang's tool isn't available to the wider public just yet - but she's planning to add elements to the bot to allow it to work for services including WeChat, WhatsApp, Kik and Facebook Messenger.
Soon, we'll be living in an age when we're not really sure if we're having a conversation with a real person, or their bot. Or perhaps discover that our bot has arranged an evening out with someone else's bot, and neither of you actually wanted to meet up in the first place. Sod this - if you need us, we'll be awaiting the end of days in a tent in the Scottish highlands.
[Via: TechCrunch]
