You may hate to admit it, but we’ve all been there: your friend is chatting incessantly on Messenger or WhatsApp and you just want to get on with your life. Well, worry not for there is now a chatbot to help you handle those moments in your life a little bit better.
Designed as part of the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, The Chat Bot Club allows you to create a bot of yourself to interact and talk with your friends so you don’t have to. Essentially it pretends to be there and paying attention, even though you’re nowhere to be found.
Built as a working concept during the show, it creator Irene Chang plans to integrate APIs and add support for WeChat, WhatsApp, Kik and Facebook Messenger among others.
The idea came to Chang after she found it impossible to stay abreast of what was really going on with her friends in the group chats they had on Facebook Messenger. She then got to work on The Chat Bot Club, using Cisco Spark and IBM Watson to help the bot learn your style of writing and interaction. For instance, if you’re an emoji-heavy person, it’d be weird if you just suddenly stopped talking using emoji.
Of course, the real fear is that, over time, everyone will be talking to their friends through bots like The Chat Bot Club. Friendships will be carried out by soulless bots, chatting to one another endlessly while their creators busy themselves with other activities, safe in the knowledge that their lifelong friendships are being maintained by a bit of code somewhere.
Let’s hope life never gets to a stage quite as dark as that.
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