Читать книгу Designing Agentive Technology - Christopher Noessel - Страница 17

The Paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux illustrate an ancient human need of mark-making. This evolution splits in two directions. One is toward expression, like paint brushes, but let’s follow the other direction that veers toward writing. Around this human need, manual tools include burnt sticks, graphite pencils, and pens. There’s not much physical effort involved in writing, but typewriters, both manual and electric, are powered tools that let people output many more letters per minute with less muscle fatigue and much more precision to the letterforms.

In addition, the advent of background spelling and grammar checkers on computers provide both metrical and assistive tools to keep you within the many conventions for clear writing. They’ve now evolved from simple rule-checkers like Sector Software’s Spellbound to more sophisticated ones like Microsoft Word’s grammar checker and iOS AutoCorrect, which not only notes misspellings, but immediately corrects the ones in which it has a high degree of confidence. Recently, Google Inbox released its Smart Reply, which parses incoming emails and provides several short, likely responses from which the user can simply select.

It all becomes agentive with the introduction of x.ai. Subscribers to this meeting scheduler only need to CC “Amy Ingram” (we see what you did there, x.) in an email asking her to “find us a time to meet” and “she” handles the rest. If you prefer a dude, the agent is happy to go by Alex as well. X.ai finds good times in your calendar, suggests them to the other people, works through conflicts, and lets you know when a fitting time has been found and a calendar reminder has been added to your calendar.