What We Learned Working As Human Chatbots.

One day, me (Alan Chung) and Caio Andrade were talking about chatbots and how people just keep saying that robots will take away our jobs. We've been hearing this all over the industry (we work in advertising).

So Chathuman was born: http://www.chathuman.org

The initial idea was:

"people are saying that robots will take away our jobs, so we decided to take away some robot's job."

As soon as we put the website up, we asked for some help to gather more people that wanted to be "human bots". At this point, Caroline Schulz joined the team and now we are more than 30 real people answering other people questions. That's when we realized that the project was not about take away robot's jobs but to start conversations about things that robots can't even think about.

Once we started talking with people we realized some pretty nice things. First of all, this chat is totally anonymous. So we know where are you from but we have absolutely no idea who you are, your age, your name, if you are man or woman.

The first learning we had was that there was A LOT of people wanting to be a human bot. Even Caroline's mother, who is 54 years old, was eager to become a robot just to talk to people when she told her about the project. That's really amazing, once the idea is absolutely simple: people talking to people.

Why there are so many people wanting eagerly to be part of a platform where you just do something we can actually do in our daily lives? At any time we want? Why do we want to be part of a platform to talk to strangers about things that matter but we are not taking our time to talk about the same things with our friends? or our doorman? or someone we meet on the street? our colleagues? Why do we need a platform for that? We had people sending us messages saying: "is this the place where we talk to real people?"

Aren't we all real people? Why do someone have to come all over there to talk to humans if there's actually pretty much no robots in our lives?

As we started there was not actually a plan, as the website says, it's just an experiment. It's been only 8 days the website is up and we talked to more than 400 people from all over the world and a part of it even came back to talk about something else, more than once. We are going to meet (the human bots) at the end of this week to share our thoughts about the project and see how can we expand the knowledge we learned here to more people. I would like very much to keep this project going, but we don't have a plan yet. Besides that we only have 14 days of free trial for this platform.

Let's talk!

More info: chathuman.org