My first crude interaction with a chatbot opened with the simplest of requests:

“Doctor Sbaitso by Creative Labs. Please enter your name.”

Oh, sure.

This crude little DOS program that came along free stuffed in with the sound card hardware was at best a gimmick. Those old enough to remember when computers could not produce audio beyond beep and boops will also remember the short span of time when the sound card revolution meant that for a mere few hundred dollars one could ram a synthesizer chipped add-on card into one of those big beige desktops we all owned. Creative Labs, the maker of what was arguably the best of those hardware cards, included on a floppy disk a small suite of software curiosities in the box, including the aforementioned Dr. Sbaitso. 

When one loaded up this bit of code the fun part, of course, was hearing your computer speak. Aloud. With a voice as luscious as a saw blade on concrete.

We obviously take computer audio for granted nowadays, but text to voice was darn near magical back then—very much as terrible as it was.

I barely considered the the other half of that software trick while basking in the sultry industrial tones of my new digital audio life: I barely considered that having a conversation with a computer was probably as big a deal as—probably a bigger deal than—a synthesized voice from a beige box.

As terrible as that conversation was, my computer was conversing with me—oh, and claiming to be a doctor.

How did we missing the red flags? How indeed.

Three decades later the abundance of objects in my life that can converse with me seems to be increasing at a rate and abundance I can no longer idly ignore. 

Thus, this site. This blog. Words. Maybe sounds and images. This is but the first post.

What is it? This is a project to write about technology and to reflect on my forty-plus years of experience with it.

Now. Please enter your name.