– Update: The free trial period is over, so I removed it for now. I might buy the tool one day. –

Don’t we all hate these stupid chat bots?

Well, meet the one I plugged into this WordPress today, using Boei. Actually, I was looking for a mailing list plugin, not for a chatbot. But Boei gave me both. I’m still on a free trial for seven days, but it already blew me away when I started testing it.

The thing about AI is that you need to feed it, but also, you want it to stay on topic, in my case, the songs and stories on my website. I already had been working on song documents for a couple of decades and that was a sort of organised in one document per song. That appears to be a perfect precondition for a smart chat bot. So, I just uploaded 285 PDF-documents and in a few minutes the chat bot knew more about my songs than I knew myself. That means, the next time you ask me about a song or a subject, I might well ask my Ch’Botty brother (that’s how I named him), something like “What songs did Simon Oak write about the New Year?”.

Another amazing bit of AI is the face that I gave him. I wanted a bit of a familiar, cartoony look, and found it by uploading a recent mugshot to imagetocartoon.com. The results are amazing and quite funny. These three examples somehow look like three generations:

Installing the chatbot was a piece of cake, maybe because this is a WordPress website and Boei offers its chatbot software as a WordPress plugin. As far as I know, Boei is “Made in The Netherlands” and follows the open source concept.

What happens behind the scenes?

When you visit this website and start chatting, the chat will be emailed to me, so I can see what you’ve asked my virtual brother. It’s anonymous until you leave your email address. Drop it in the chat if you want me to contact you.

Thank you in advance for contacting me!