Developer creates chatbot which can pretend to be you in group messages
The 'Chat Bot Club' program makes it easier to ignore your nearest and dearest than ever before
Your support helps us to tell the story
This election is still a dead heat, according to most polls. In a fight with such wafer-thin margins, we need reporters on the ground talking to the people Trump and Harris are courting. Your support allows us to keep sending journalists to the story.
The Independent is trusted by 27 million Americans from across the entire political spectrum every month. Unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock you out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. But quality journalism must still be paid for.
Help us keep bring these critical stories to light. Your support makes all the difference.
If you're too busy, lazy or antisocial to keep up with all the conversations happening in your Facebook Messenger inbox, then an American developer has just created the perfect program for you.
During the recent TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon in New York, Irene Chang made the The Chat Bot Club - a program that essentially creates a robotic version of yourself, which can post messages in conversations and trick your friends into thinking that you're actually there.
Using the Cisco Spark messaging app as her platform, Chang used IBM's Watson chatbot software to build the program, TechCrunch reports.
The Chat Bot Club monitors your messages and gradually learns your messaging 'style', building up a database of your typical reponses, favourite phrases, and most-used emojis.
The bot can then send messages to your group chats, making it seem like you're paying attention while you focus on more important things.
Obviously, the bot can only do so much. It's not going to be able to respond to meaningful questions very well, and other users in the group would probably realise they're talking to a bot fairly quickly.
But if you just want to appear as though you're not completely ignoring the conversation, it works quite well. It's very much an experimental service at the minute, but Chang is working on integrating it into services like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and more.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments