If you haven't had a chance yet, you should go talk with Ms. Dewey, the latest clever idea from the people in Windows Live Search.  She's saucy, she's sexy, and she even poses provocatively.  So what is Ms. Dewey?  She's an interactive agent (aka bot).

Instead of a fully automated and animated avatar front end, the team that created her brute forced the front end by combining video's of the actor in response to hundreds of questions.  The agent back end meshes those together,  and provides the most appropriate ... or seemigly random response based on what you request along with the occasional surprise for the user.

The resulting application is something people find very entertaining, or just over the top.  Pick your camp, but I find her pretty entertaining.  My brother Brett and I spent at least an hour  asking her stupid quesitons.

An obvious question might be if this uses the newly acquired Colloquis platform?  Nope... but it is the types of scenarios that could be enabled via the platform.  Ideally agents should be end-point agnostic, although with unique features based on the end-points (clients) where they're surfaced.  If Ms. Dewey didn't take the whole page, would remember my previous searches so she'd be quicker and more effective at finding information for me, I think she'd be even more useful.

It's great to post this entry.  For my friends and family that have wondered what it is that Todd's been working on over the last year ... here it is (Microsoft acquires Colloquis) :) 

Bots or chatbots are conversational applicaitons that people interact with today via Messenger, the web, and mobile.  The chatbot has been around since the dawn of time in computing, okay, so at least since the year I was born (ELIZA).  With the phenomena of instant messaging the chatbots moved to IM.  The classic IM bot is SmarterChild (you can IM smarterchild@hotmail.com), which a company called ActiveBuddy launched on the AOL AIM network in 2001.  As history would go ActiveBuddy became Colloquis, which is now Microsoft--and SmarterChild is now the mascot of Windows Live Messenger.

The combination of a conversational applicaiton platform (Colloquis) with Messenger and other Windows Live services will be interesting indeed.  Welcome aboard SmarterChild.


Here's the link to a Washington Posts story today on some other chatbots