Weavrs : emotion, relation as the new AI

From the Future Everything Conference two weeks ago I was introduced and started to play around with Weavrs.com. Weavr bots aren't bad bots, they aren't even AI and they have implications for communications and marketing: in the words of co-creator David Bausola (@zeroinfluencer), the bots "match understanding of human emotion with what’s going on online.”

here are some notes I took (assume everything is paraphrasing of what @zeroinfluencer said, unless in quotes, then it's a direct quote; none of this is my thoughts)

• Data filtering using simulated human behaviours based upon probability and framed with generative editorial
• In Weavr editor, use terms meta-data for her emotions, personality adjectives, schedule and things it likes.
• System creates robots to help understand human interactions
• “Because these characters are pure data they are completely plausible”
• using data from locative apps, it shares peoples' lives
• Works anywhere with plentiful data
• define where your bot publishes (twitter, FB, tumblr, etc)
• in Twitter for example, RT a symbol of empathy: it isn’t you liking a link or disliking it, it’s you relating to it -- the bots with defined emotions defined by metadata take further

Anyone who follows my twitter stream knows that I miss my dog a lot. I set up a Twitter account for her last year and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to pretend she's having her own life, even her own life with me in London (instead of laying around my Mum's house in Wisconsin).

She changes her background when she starts to 'feel' different emotions. The colours reflect her moods. At one point she learnt unhappiness which I then went in and deleted. My pup is always happy and I want her to be upbeat.

She listens to music on last.fm, reads books, and goes to craft evenings in London. She tweets and retreats and on the weavr bot page, she says what her emotive inspiration is.

Here are some screen shots:

Here are some of the adjectives and emotions I used to define her:

I'm not an expert, but I think this relates or is Affective Computing. (Sadly the Emotive Computing talk at FutureEverything was cancelled.) Affective Computing is a field I'm going to start looking at for my PhD because my research is suggesting that a lot of social media is emotion based, in fact the way that we interact with interfaces is highly emotional.

This is an amazing and interesting field and I'm really grateful that Weavrs is available to mess around with free.

Review: "Him, Her, & Them"

Definitely gets coolness points for unconventionally shaped screen and being based entirely "in" Facebook. But lack of narrative and interface problems almost defeats the purpose of 'interacting' with it.

Basing a film "in" Facebook (as a platform) has a lot of potential and in this perspective "Him, Her, and Them" was a massive let-down. Sorry.

Before I get to what I didn't like, I want to talk about the things I think it does well.

"Him, Her, and Them" used a segmented square-shaped screen and a combination of still images, moving portraiture, and regular 'film' sequences to tell the story.

Click to read more ...