futuretrack5

Give your web applications life

Posted by Dave Rosen April 7, 2006

Do your web applications speak to you? Ours do.

XHTMLized gets quite a few quote requests. Most of these are from people wanting XHTML / CSS. However we get many photos of Care Bears and Baseball Players too.

Requests would come into the admin. Photos of Care Bears were flagged as dummy requests; else we’d provide a quote.

It was time consuming so Ilya had the brainchild to create MonkeyBot. MonkeyBot is our AI team member who helps make things happen.

Initially MonkeyBot was a learning algorithm that watched what we did. MonkeyBot collected the data on how we would handle quote requests. MonkeyBot then formulated his own hypothesis on if the quote was a dummy or not. After a couple of weeks MonkeyBot became quite intelligent and was capable of handling this task himself.

However before we could fully delegate the responsibility over to MonkeyBot, he needed the other basic component of AI: personality.

We gave MonkeyBot his own lingo, looks, style and stride. By doing this he seemed a lot more human. So we treat him a lot more like a human. We put him on all our projects, assign him new To-Dos and include him in daily FutureTrack5 activities.

Recently MonkeyBot has even been able to interact with us in Basecamp thanks to the new Basecamp API – but more details on this later.

So if you have some process in your web application that you would rather not do, create your own AI personality. Develop its brain and teach it to speak. You wont be the one on the team who’s going bananas.