I’ve been thinking about my lack of progress on The Social Robot project. It occurs to me that it’s been at a standstill because I’ve been finding it very hard to motivate myself. I think that’s be...

Introduction Imagine being confined to your home, unable to step outside, yet still having the ability to work and socialize as if you were out in the world. This isn’t a futuristic dream; it’s ...

I just finished listening to the Bot Love podcast and that got me wondering: “can it really be possible for a human and AI to be friends?” Asymmetric friendship normally refers to friendships in w...

There have been so many recent articles on ChatGPT that I wasn’t originally planning to write one. It’s designed to be an AI assistant (think Alexa, Siri) rather than provide companionship and so i...

In the previous article on gRPC I described creating a client and server in go that could stream messages using gRPC bi-directional streaming. The client in that article was just for testing purpos...

Most robots don’t have a great deal on on-board processing power and so when we considered the basic architecture of The Social Robot it was clear we need to offload as much work as we can. In the ...

So far we’ve talked about Replika and Woebot but we’d be remiss if we didn’t also talk about Kuki - the only chatbot that has won the Loebner Prize for the most human-like program five times. The t...

Continuous Integration (CI) in the practice of automatically building and testing software every time a change is made. In the last decade I don’t think I’ve worked on a single professional project...

Whereas Replika aims to be an engaging conversation partner purely for entertainment (there are some chat topics related to mental health but they feel very half-hearted and a bit of an after tho...

I intend to publish on a two-week cadence, but I let life get away from me a bit over the last few weeks and so this post is very late. Sorry! I will do better in future. There are other existin...