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Chatterbots, Nanny-Bots, and Other Creatures

© Daniel Saceano

Bots are envisioned to become indispensable companions and advisors to humans. They will have strong antropomorphic features: the ability to communicate effectively, to learn and make decisions on their own, to filter and "enhance" information, and most likely will have a human face and voice.

But I think the most interesting function of bots will be that of interpreting, and therefore enhancing the value of knowledge. That means not only organizing data, but also making sense of it, creating value-added levels where this data acquires higher functions. This can be done in the beginning by human-machine collaboration.

It becomes imperiously necessary to organize the avalanche of time-sensitive data on topics like "biotechnology" (for example), into basic areas like "present status", "history of", "research in progress", "next year forecasting", "1-3 years forecasting", etc, according to subtopics, and this function will most likely given to bots. 

"The Net will soon experience the debut of `distributed agents': swarms of bots acting in concert, updating each other and correlating events all over the Net", said Andre Leonard, the author of the book Bots: The Origin of New Species  (published by Hardwired, 1997).

As we described in another article (Web's Future: The Next Few Years), a bot is by definition a software program, as opposed to the "nut-and bolt" robot variety. Although without human graphic features at this moment, there are already hundreds of these strange creatures on the Web, performing standard functions, and more are created every day. Some are chatterbots (chatting freely via written phrases), searchbots (finding Web sites), mailbots (sorting e-mail messages), modbots (moderating newsgroups), and other types.

Lycos, the famous engine used by many of us, is in fact a bot created to explore the Web and to answer search questions. Others, like CNN Custom News, are customizing information according to user preferences.

Recent agent technology allows consumers to do price comparison shopping. Among others of this type, a bot called Acses compares prices for books, availability of titles, shipping costs and shipping time for over 20 online bookstores.

There are also malevolent, out-of-control, malicious bots that might create havoc on networks. They may exist on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) or the Web, and some consider them a threat for the Net's future. But we already have malicious strings of computer code called viruses, haven't we? Despite of all these, the Net still exists, and we do computing every day in increasing numbers.

CHATTING WITH BOTS

The Simon Laven Page is a collection of links to conversational (including teachable) bots. Unfortunately, most chatterbots today can communicate only via typing your questions.