::scr on agents[0] was on bots

[celia romaniuk]

On Tue, 12 Feb 2002, Simon Wistow wrote:

> Ircle on the Mac (ISTR) let's you set a Regex and it will speak lines
> containing it. Useful because you can set it to only speak when your
> name is mentioned.

Yup. I used to enable this,  but the namespace issues got annoying. That's
my own fault for having a silly nick, though.

http://shadowgirl.net/stuff/ircle_prefs.gif

> > [ bots as an interface ]

> 90% of the time it will work brilliantly. And the rest of the time the
> user will forgive
>
> "sorry, simon, I don't understand you"
>
> a lot more than "error 16545 : command executable not present in varargs
> tree" </technical mumbo jumbo style="tongue in cheek">

Yeah. Yeah. Um, I'm too brainfried right now to answer the rest of your
post, so here are some notes I wrote in response to your post on Friday.
But in short, dipsy is polite (unless people feed her impolite stuff)...
and that's important.

On Fri, 8 Feb 2002, Simon Wistow wrote:

> I'll kick
> off with this simple question - are there merits in putting a more human
> interface onto our ccomputers : more specifically could it benefit both
> power users *and* novices whilst supplying a neat pathway between them -
> an Intelligent Path to 733t enlightenment if you will - in a way that
> would make even the much invoked Mr Raskin drool.

Well, er, yeah.

I'm going to reference a book again. This time, it's 'The Media Equation'.
(bah, the Blueyonder transproxy is b0rked again. You can amazon/google for
it yerselves).
[ it's at http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1575860538/ ]

Basically, the premise is that people treat computers as human.

from the back cover:

"[the authors] present the results of numerous psychological studies that
led them to the conclusion that people treat computers, television and new
media as real people and places. Their studies show that people are polite
to computers; that they treat computers with female voices differently
than male-voiced computers; that large faces on a screen can invade a
person's body space; and that motion on screen affects physical responses
in the same way that real-life motion does. One of their startling
conclusions is that the human brain has not evolved quickly enough to
assimilate twentieth-century technologies. The authors detail how this
knowledge can help us better design and evaluate media technolgies..."

I haven't read the whole book, so I can't comment in detail.

But when I first started hanging out on #london.pm, and seeing how dipsy
worked, it struck me that she was this kind of human-computer interfaces
that I'd read about. To give you an idea, some of the chapter headings in
the book are 'politeness', 'interpersonal distance', 'flattery', 'judging
self and others'. I think dipsy does very well given these criteria e.g.


> media equation?
     dipsy: i don't know, space

> dipsy, botsnack
     dipsy: :)

> explain karma blech?
     dipsy: Positive: "namecheck in NTK!","makes the right
decisions","vantage point of london tour idea" ... Negative: "being
thinner than muttley is basically because HE DOESN'T EAT PROPERLY!","well
in that case i'm taking the karma back ;-)","too many disguises" ...
Overall: 240

and then there's this:

> follow me
     dipsy: sorry...
> follow me
     dipsy: huh?
> follow me
     dipsy: i'm not following you...



Bots are definitely cool.

Right.

Must. Have. Tea.


Celia