The new buddy won't be real. It will be a "bot" created by New York company ActiveBuddy, which is developing technology that lets popular software for trading short text messages be used to grab information stored on Web sites and computer databases.
Rather than visiting a Web site for stock market information, for example, a person could send an instant message with the text "IBM stock" and instantly receive a response with the current price of IBM shares.
An early version of the technology is already quietly living inside AOL Time Warner, Microsoft and Yahoo chat networks, providing movie schedules, stock quotes, and news headlines. It also can search for dictionary terms or answer math questions.
Although it's still new, the service holds the potential to expand consumers' ideas of the possibilities far beyond the traditional Internet. It could even increase use of an IM service--for example, AOL Instant Messenger--as it siphons traffic from popular Web portals.
At the least, it will change people's view of the lowly chat window.
"This opens up some areas (for the Net) that really haven't been explored," said Michael Pazzani, a University of California at Irvine computer science professor who studies interactive technologies and also heads a company focusing on personalized information. "This opens up a lot of possibilities."
Fetch, robot
ActiveBuddy is putting a new twist on an old idea of bots or "intelligent agents"--small pieces of software that can act more or less independently of direct human control. The service meshes the
"chatterbots" that have populated the Net for decades, badly mimicking human conversation, with the database searching functions of an ordinary portal such as Yahoo's My Yahoo service.
One of the earliest and best known of these "chatterbots" was named Eliza, replicating the often-maddening responses of a psychologist to a patient. Responding to questions and conversation with new questions of "her" own, even this rudimentary bot was able to fool many people online into thinking that "she" was a real person.
ActiveBuddy's technology doesn't go nearly this far in trying to mimic human responses. Instead it has joined with a lineage of software such as Atomica (formerly GuruNet), Octopus and Copernic that have tried--with only marginal success--to allow people to gather information from multiple places on the Net without having to visit Web sites.
Automatic chat services and quick information tools haven't gained much traction in the past. But combining the two strategies inside instant messaging, which is already familiar to tens of millions of people, could prove the breakthrough that the two worlds have lacked separately.
To consumers, the ActiveBuddy tool appears as just another name on a "buddy" list of one of the various IM providers. But on the other end of the buddy is a computer rather than a person.
ActiveBuddy, backed by Reuters and Wit SoundView Ventures, has developed a natural language search called "buddy script." This script can communicate with various content databases, such as Reuters, to pull up answers on topics in lightening speed. For a question such as "What's the weather?" the application will request a ZIP code, then provide the local forecast by tapping a weather database. The answer is then sent back to the message box--instantly.
"There are certain kinds of information that you just don't need HTML and a four-color Web page...to communicate to you," said ActiveBuddy CEO Peter Levitan. "This is an alternative way to get to information faster."
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