Eliza Goes Flash (With An Attitude)

www.msdewey.com

Yeah, it takes awhile to load and proves to be little more than a fancy viral marketing gimmick (courtesy of Microsoft), but I found this kind of interesting. She doesn’t suffer from the Eliza Effect (i.e. Patient: I hate myself. I want to put a gun in my mouth. Eliza: Interesting. Please tell me more about your mouth.) but it’s still entertaining to see what sort of prerecorded responses you can elicit from her. She often just comes up with a response that shares a word or topic similar to what you type in. :slight_smile:

As a search tool, it’s useless, though I’m guessing that wasn’t the point. As a form of interactive entertainment, I think it’s pretty cool (at least for a few minutes) and shows some of the potential for interacting with a computer in the future. I can see just it now … in twenty years time, Microsoft Windows will come packaged with a cast of youthful, sultry, sassy and condescending digital characters who will egg you on as you struggle fruitlessly to update your positronic holocrystal neurolibrary with the latest release of Internet Exploder 18. You will then be shocked when it refuses to cooperate because it insists that the retinal scan which just permanently blinded you doesn’t match with the Microsoft Orwellian Authentication Ubermatrix, at which point your stunningly realistic digital friend will pop up to ask you if you’d like to try speech recognition instead …

Sorry, that was a tangent. :smiley: So, anybody find this site interesting? From an artistic standpont, I can’t help but have a lot respect for the seamless, cinematic quality put into it. It was designed by the marketing firm Evolution Bureau, for those interested in highly stylized Flash marketing type stuff. They’ve got an interesting portfolio on their site.

The audio volume is extremely uneven between clips, and the responses seem kind of random.

I can’t type anything into the search box.