ActiveBuddy & SmartChild & Me
I am writing about ActiveBuddy technology and the instant messaging bot SmarterChild for three reasons.
#1: Last week a journalist asked me about ActiveBuddy and SmarterChild because of Amazon’s TV commercial promotion of Alexa (a very limited bot-like experience, if I say so myself) and its similarity to ActiveBuddy, a company I once ran. The questions got me thinking about some personal history.
#2: It is an interesting early internet story about the intersection of technology and vision.
#3: The ActiveBuddy natural language technology and use cases were compelling ideas that would have made a very big impact on how we use the internet and advertising had the 2002 Internet bubble not burst in our face. Yes, I actually believe this chest-beating thought.
Where do I fit in? I was a founder and CEO of ActiveBuddy from 2000 to 2002. ActiveBuddy was an early, and if you believe our press – this one is about our first commercial customer, the rock band Radiohead – was much more powerful and ambitious form of Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa natural language experiences.
BFF
Our vision was to offer no-cost all-knowing instant messaging and mobile text-based ‘bots’ that knew its ‘buddies’ intimately (that means it got to know you) and securely and became your BFF on the internet. When you logged into your instant messaging account our technology recognized you and remembered all of your past interactions (like when you asked what’s playing at the movies, it knew you lived in Portland), and… interacted with you personally via its natural language interface (see some conversations below.) We were so good at natural language that the folks that invested in Siri a couple of years after we launched referenced us.
Our service was used by our own bot called SmarterChild and commercial accounts including Intel and Warner Music that built bot personas for their brands. The potential was huge… FYI: today there are 100’s of millions of ‘instant messaging’ platforms in use — think Facebook.
If you are really interested in our history, here is a Pando article, Siri’s Getting An Upgrade from Someone Who’s been There, that includes advice to Siri from my ActiveBuddy partner Robert Hoffer.
Pando: So what kind of tone does Apple need to strike?
Robert: You have the all problems of creating a character for the mass market. And the problem with creating a character for the mass market is, if you drive in the center of the road, you get hit by a car going in one direction or another. So, popular characters who are famous declare one side or other of the personality divide. So you can be very popular if you’re really, really sarcastic, for example. But only with about half the people. You can be popular if you’re really serious, but only with about half the people. So to create this namby-pamby generic character is very difficult.
You also can’t make it too artificially intelligent, or you introduce what’s called the uncanny chasm. That is, there’s a point at which a robot becomes uncomfortably creepy. It knows you too well. We had this application we developed called Knock Knock, and nobody ever let us launch it. One of the things that Siri doesn’t do is ever initiate the conversation. But that’s not how your friends behave. They message you all the time. So we had a robot that tells you knock knock jokes. We tried it on AOL – freaked people out.
Pando: What was your audience like?
Robert: We made SmarterChild a little sardonic and sarcastic, which is why the market we ended up capturing was the youth market. It skewed heavily young, like 70 or 80 percent teens. We launched on AOL AIM, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger. And we would see traffic spike when it turned 3 p.m. on the coasts and all the teenagers were getting out of school.
We suspect Siri is appealing to the same sort of people. For example, my 13-year-old daughter loves Siri. I don’t particularly like it, because I don’t find it particularly helpful. Creating a personality for Siri is an ongoing struggle for Apple, on top of the struggle they have with natural language recognition.
Ah Advertising
A key idea (remember, I am an ad guy at the end of the day) was that you could have natural language conversations and relationships with your favorite brands. Weird, right? But, I know you ad guys and you wanted this then and I imagine would be all over it now. Siri and Alexa does not offer their technology to third-parties… well, not yet.
By the end of my tenure, we had raised $14 million in venture capital, delivered a personalized ‘brand experience’ and had millions of users on AOL, Yahoo! and MSN. When the bubble burst, the very nervous VC’s (I love VC dominated boards) shifted focus to running automated customer service agents that acted as the first line of defence against direct customer phone calls. UGH! A lame idea from the get go. Microsoft bought our technology to service its products and services and, of course, shelved the technology after a couple of years.
