Presented a brief demo of my chatbots this evening. There was a technical fumble for perhaps 3-5 minutes, switching from DVD mode to laptop-projection mode, which caused us to lose half of the already small audience.

In my talk, I said that chatbots range from commercial/"practical" (which don't particularly interest me, since they're like salesmen and customer-service reps) to the entertaining/artistic/literary (which do interest me, just as does any form of literary/artistic composition).

I don't think it really got across to the audience what it was all about. It was brought home to me how important it is to have a brief, highly focused presentation, with strong audiovisuals. I can't compete with a presentation like Jabberwacky's George, who has speech recognition and synthetic voice, and a 3D animated avatar with moving arms and hands, seated at a desk in an office environment.

The USA is not an interior culture, but an exterior one; not slow, deliberate and thoughtful, but made for the fast, punchy and aggressive.

Labels: chat robot