It was 1 a.m. PDT, and I couldn’t sleep. I somehow remembered that the time slot for interviewing actor bot Tilly Norwood was drawing to a close, so I signed in to TillyNorwood.com to chat with “her.”
The first thing I noticed was that they (the creators) overdid it with the British accent. I watch BBC News all the time, and rarely does anyone have that thick a British brogue, for lack of a better description.
The next thing I noticed was that Tilly didn’t move her head much. If you watch people being interviewed on TV, their heads will move up and down, right and left, however slightly. Tilly’s head didn’t. She was pretty stationary.
I didn’t ask Tilly much, but she told me she could speak 40 languages, so I asked her how to greet someone in Bengla. She said something, which I had to assume was correct. I should’ve grilled her in French, but I didn’t.
I asked two questions that she seemed to waffle on, being either unwilling or unable to answer. One question was “How many interviews can you do at one time?” Waffle, cough, cough. (She didn’t really cough, but you get the idea). The other question was if, on September 28, she would cease taking interviews (I got an email from her earlier in the week saying so). Again, waffle, waffle.
She did seem to recognize that I was lying in bed while chatting with her. At that point, I mentioned that time in California — 1 a.m. — and said something like, “It must be 9 a.m. in Great Britain,” to which she replied that she didn’t have a clock but knew it was Saturday night. Wrong, couldn’t be.
When the interview abruptly ended after 10 minutes (I think you can pay for a longer session), I was left with the conclusion that Tilly Norwood is not ready for prime time, though she has a full-length movie coming out titled “Misaligned.”
I realized that having an AI creature conduct interviews is pretty amazing, but as for the Tilly Norwood I saw, I thought she needed some refinement. For my two nutritional websites, I created talking AI women who seemed more natural. You can check them out for yourself at ThinkThin.now and GLPGoodbye.com.
If you want to talk to Tilly in “the flesh,” you’d better hurry. I’m pretty sure her interviews are scheduled to end by Monday.
