Season Of Good Will And Human Skill

Lift Your Language; Human Skills

I remember a conversation I had with a client some years ago. It was in the very early days of AI. I don’t mean tools like ChatGPT and the like; this was about chat bots on websites, ‘virtual assistants’ and characters like Google and Siri.

We were discussing, in a light-hearted way, how natural it seemed to talk to these bots as though they were human beings. We’d say, ‘Hey Siri, could you please convert $675 US dollars to Australian dollars?’ or  ‘Hey Google, what’s the weather forecast for Perth, please’.

And when we got the answers, we’d sing out ‘Thank you’, without even thinking about it.

We laughed that we were being so polite to machines.

Good old digital assistants! Wonder if they’re starting to feel human.

Real human beings should be so lucky!