Programming Throwdown Episode 122, Building Conversational AIs with Joe Bradley. Take it away, Jason.

Hey, everybody. So one of my most fond memories is playing this game, this really esoteric

game called Essex, which I think is named after a place in the UK. But it was this game

where it was like Zork, if people are familiar the UK, but it was this game where it was like Zork,

if people are familiar with that, but it was one of these text-based story games where you

would type, you know, go north, go west.

And the thing that amazed me, I mean, I was maybe seven or eight years old, the thing that

amazed me was that I could, I felt like I could just say anything

to these computer players

and that they would respond with really interesting things.

And it ran on a single floppy disk.

And so, you know, honestly, to this day,

it kind of blows my mind.

But as a child, it just completely blew my mind.

I mean, I was wondering if there was a real person somehow involved, like, you know, at real time.

And I've always been really interested in conversational AI. And I feel like we're all just exceptionally lucky to have Joe Bradley here, who's the chief scientist, a live person, who is an expert in this field, and really going to talk to us about how conversational AI kind of works, a bit of the history behind it and how kind of a live person and other folks do it today. So thanks so much for coming on the show, Joe.

Hey, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here and even more excited about the fact that you just brought up Zork. For me, that was the one. It wasn't the, you know, the Essex or that I didn't know about, but, but yeah, I spent hours doing that as a kid. And it's funny, too, I have children myself now and I see them, you know, just last week I went downstairs and

they're not playing Zork, right? But they're playing the equivalent on, you know, the Amazon device,

on the Alexa. Somebody's coded up a little like exploration game and now they're talking to that.

But it's essentially the same interface just with the, you know, voice instead of text. And it's

still fun for them, which I think is like really interesting, even in this age of like, hey, does everything have to be these like cool looking graphics?

And, you know, what's the UX got to be like?

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