WHAT'S HOT IN BOTS

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

Wouldn't it be cool if there were an electronic diary that you could write to and it would write back?" asked my brilliant eight-year-old, Zoe. Thus began another Mr. Peabody Night in the Quittner household, with me, Zoe and Ella, 6, cruising the Web in search of infotainment. We piled into the Mac, slipped out onto the Infobahn and, faster than you can say, "Open the pod doors, Hal," found ourselves in the company of Julia.

Julia is a computer program, a piece of genuine artificial intelligence with a crude front end (you type as if chatting on America Online). She is also spellbinding. Indeed, our conversation with Julia was so realistic my girls, convinced that a carbon-based life-form was doing the real typing, insisted the whole thing was a scam. "Do you like cats?" Julia asked us. "Nope," I typed back, nudging Zoe and Ella to watch as I tripped up the primitive program. "I like pizza." "Great," replied Julia. "I go crazy for pizza." Doh! Next, Ella, the bawdiest member of her first-grade class (she can sing virtually any Green Day song, four-letter-word for word), pecked out an unprintable suggestion. Julia didn't miss a beat: "You eat with that mouth?"

I was smitten. So I looked up Julia's creator, Michael Mauldin, who told me that he built the "chatterbot" in 1990 to reside in the virtual world of TinyMUD, an early experiment in online community building in the pre-Web Internet. Mauldin's idea was to use the all-text environment of the MUD to stage a so-called Turing Test--that is, he wanted to build a piece of software that could trick humans into thinking they were communicating with one of their own. It worked. "One guy hit on Julia for 13 days," recalls Mauldin, noting that although the bot was always brushing off her online Lothario, he interpreted it as coyness.

In 1994 Julia moved to the Web, where she's lived ever since, more or less unmolested by the two dozen souls a day who stumble across her. Mauldin, meantime, graduated from bots to spiders. A researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, he designed Lycos, one of the first search engines on the Web. But Julia remained his first love. And earlier this year he started a company in Pittsburgh, Pa., called Virtual Personalities Inc., that will transplant Julia's artificial intelligence into other onscreen beings. He wants to build online games that even girls will play. "Boys like video games because they can shoot things," says Mauldin. "Girls want games they can talk to." To that end, Mauldin this month is releasing a free, downloadable demo of his newest chatterbot, Sylvie, a computer-generated redhead whose lips move when she talks. He's working on a new version of Sylvie that can change facial expressions as she talks to you, although for this he would charge a modest fee. Marketing tip for Mauldin: two words--"interactive diary."

You'll find both Sylvie and Julia at www.vperson.com

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