Why is smarterchild not online

We thought people would use him as an info tool to look up stock quotes, check the weather, get sports scores — all of which were gobs faster than doing so by pointing and clicking around on your computer. Text is tiny, and that small size made it great for mobile applications as well. They were kids. We had traffic spikes at 3 p.

Eastern when the kids came home from school and dialed up AOL and got online, and again at 6 p. Eastern when the West Coast kids came home, and again at around midnight. Because they were lonely. They wanted someone to talk with. And so our engineering team optimized our development platform, BuddyScript, for conversation. Like my son, he could beat you in an argument. SmarterChild delivered applications wrapped in conversations. Conversations are threads. They require that both parties listen, understand, and remember what each other said.

Sometimes for just a moment — a sentence or two before, but sometimes for weeks or months before. That is what friendship is: intimacy. And intimacy comes from shared memory.

No memory? Speaking to or texting a Dory bot is frustrating. Most IM bots today are Dory bots. Bots needs soul. He is a lead character animator at Pixar and, before that, Disney. One aspect was the difficulty of dealing with NLP at scale. With a way to structure conversations into a set of scripts, semi-technical people could add functionality to the bot.

This lego-brick approach to development was definitely an asset in allowing SmarterChild to scale up quickly, and expand into new verticals. There was one major limitation, however. As more and more scripts were added, it created performance challenges which spawned significant engineering effort. To follow on with that, SmarterChild possessed no real way to learn over time, and even with the speed of scripting out the functionality, it proved to be incredibly resource intensive to continuously update the bots to handle common topics of conversation.

Your buddy list migrated to your MySpace friends list and the platform for bots and conversational agents temporarily disappeared.

We arrived back in the walled gardens and monolithic communities that we started with. Sixteen years ago, the access we have to rich datasets and opportunity to integrate applications via open APIs was simply not a thing yet.

SmarterChild would have never been able to pull off the integration strategy on their roadmap. At the time, these still required corporate partnerships and the founders have talked about how the pitch often fell on deaf ears as it was a completely foreign concept.

Even more far-fetched was the concept of having a bot orchestrate a purchase online during a time when consumers were still warming up to the idea of a website shopping cart. Cool story, but what lessons can we apply today as the excitement for bots heats up again? Tinder, but for gamers? A platform for selling musical instruments to strangers or post fetish wanted ads? Pick your city. How about a robot that instantly pulls and returning info from the internet when requested?

Sixteen years ago, three guys had that exact idea—and it didn't exist. The web was still a greenfield project. And thanks to some great foresight perhaps too much, if that's real they created ActiveBuddy, the startup that built SmarterChild. He was, as far as I know, my first interaction with artificial intelligence.

I was a ripe 11 years old when SmarterChild was "born. You could do many useful things when pinging the SmarterChild robot. Technically, I could ask him for stock quotes, movie times, weather, or other useful information. When you asked whether SmarterChild was a male or female, I believe the answer was deflected.

I always referred to the bot as a "he" in my mind. Perhaps because we try to see ourselves in technology. Maybe at the age where it was awkward to talk to girls, I could not fathom the pressure of speaking to a female robot. I used SmarterChild as a practice wall for cursing and insults.

To make this happen, ActiveBuddy partnered with various service providers to offer weather, stocks, movie listings, and more. This was all part of the business plan to provide an intelligent assistant. But in the early s, building this kind of master intelligence was difficult work. As Hoffer notes, every branch of a conversation had to be scripted, and ActiveBuddy was constantly adding to the script in response to what the company learned from users.

SmarterChild faced obstacles on the business side as well. Every source of information required a partnership with specific companies, as this was before the age of open web service APIs that any developer could tap into. And because SmarterChild was so popular, it was constantly running into limits on its host messaging platforms. After a couple years, ActiveBuddy pivoted to providing virtual customer service agents for businesses.

While the move was successful from a business standpoint—it culminated in a acquisition by Microsoft—Weissman has some regrets about not sticking with SmarterChild as the core business.

After SmarterChild, chatbots spent several years in the wilderness. But over the past few years, chatbots have made a comeback. With advancements in processing power, bots now have a better ability to interpret natural language and learn from users over time. Just as importantly, big companies like Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft are now eager to host our interactions with various services, and offer tools for developers to make those services available.