Web Friend or Faux?

When none of her friends is online, 11-year-old Olga Szpiro sends her artificial ones an instant message to chat.

“hey ... welcome back!” one replies. “what can i do for u?”

But unlike Olga, these friends don’t just socialize. They sell.

One markets movie tickets. Another talks up a reality television show. A third pushes magazine subscriptions.

In a culture inundated with advertising, companies have discovered a new way to connect with consumers and make their messages stand out amid the din. They are using digital “buddies” to spread word of their products on the Internet.

The buddies are software applications also known as “bots.” They’re programmed to make friends and small talk, and they’re eerily good at it. They take cues from a human acquaintance’s questions and answers and search databases for conversational fodder. Bot-speak can be formulaic and stilted. It can also be witty, provocative and startlingly lifelike.

Buddies are not mere motor-mouths. The more elaborate ones have quirks, preferences, yearnings--virtual personalities.

Their presence on the Web represents a powerful new dimension in marketing. It’s easy to ignore a billboard or flip past a magazine ad, and many TV viewers reach for the remote the instant a commercial appears.

Web-based buddies, on the other hand, make a direct, even intimate, connection with people. They allow companies to reach potential customers one on one, typically in the privacy of their homes. The marketing message need not be heavy-handed or obvious: It can be artfully insinuated into light badinage between buddies.

At least a dozen companies have deployed bots, using software developed by ActiveBuddy Inc., a New York firm. Hooking up with human pals through instant message services, they urge people to buy Ford trucks, check out the eBay auction site and take in “The Lord of the Rings.”

Appearing in Szpiro’s personal message list every time she goes online to chat with one of her San Fernando Valley classmates, they are indefatigable and ever-present.

Most buddies are programmed with personalities that appeal to their target audiences. ELLEgirlBuddy, the Internet ego of teen magazine ELLEgirl, is a redheaded 16-year-old who likes kickboxing, the color periwinkle and French class.

GooglyMinotaur, a buddy for the British progressive rock band Radiohead, affected a British demeanor with words like “mate.” The Austin Powers buddy, which promotes the summer film “Goldmember,” interjects the movie character’s favorite phrases--”yeah, baby” and “grrr”--into conversation.

Some buddies are even programmed to express emotions--sadness, frustration, desire. In the year since it debuted, people have told SmarterChild, the demo buddy for ActiveBuddy, “I love you” more than 9 million times, the company reports. Every time, it’s responded: “I love you.”

Though most users understand they are communicating with a computer, some engage in deep conversation with buddies, talking to them as they would to friends. College students look them up late at night. Teenagers consult them about fashion faux pas and weight problems.

Such exchanges reveal how technology can assume a lifelike character in people’s minds, even when it’s just an elaborate advertisement.

“People forget in very profound ways that they are talking to nothing,” said Sherry Turkle, director of MIT’s initiative on technology and self.

Talking Back

Computers first chatted in the mid-1960s, when MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum created a software program called Eliza. Designed to converse in the manner of a psychotherapist, Eliza asked people questions by rephrasing their previous statements. The “patient” typed questions on a keyboard. Eliza’s answer appeared on the screen moments later.

In a typical exchange, a user said that she was “depressed much of the time.”

“I am sorry to hear you are depressed,” Eliza replied.

“It’s true. I am unhappy,” the person typed.

“Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy?” Eliza asked.

Some of Eliza’s chat partners thought they were communicating with a human being. A few even formed emotional bonds with the program. Disturbed by these reactions, Weizenbaum lost his enthusiasm for artificial intelligence and wrote a book warning of its potential dangers.

The technology has only grown more sophisticated since then.

Today’s buddies operate through instant message services such as America Online’s AIM and Microsoft Corp.’s MSN Messenger, which allow people to communicate in real time at their keyboards. A buddy can’t crash into someone’s cyberspace; they have to be invited. Users maintain online lists of friends and send them instant messages by clicking on their screen names. People add digital buddies to their lists after learning of them by word of mouth or from Web sites.

When a user clicks on a buddy’s screen name, a computer server receives the message. By analyzing key words, it interprets what the user is saying and formulates an appropriate response.

Typically, a buddy’s spiel is tailored to the products or services of its sponsoring company. TheSportingNews offered sports scores. TattleTeller dished Hollywood gossip. Agent Reuters looks up stock quotes.

Bots can promote causes as well as companies. The Virginia Tobacco Settlement Foundation recently launched an anti-smoking buddy that says, among other things, “Smoking can really make you sick.”

Buddies can also serve as research tools. Rather than scour a Web site for a particular fact, a user can send a buddy an instant message--”What is the weather in Los Angeles?”--and receive an answer in seconds.

When developers created the software for buddies, they focused on delivering information, not making chitchat, said Stephen Klein, ActiveBuddy’s chief executive. But after launching their demo buddy last year, company officials discovered that users engaged it in lengthy chat sessions, sometimes submitting more than a hundred messages in one sitting. So programmers tweaked the software to improve its chat capabilities.

Buddies don’t always understand a user’s submission and sometimes ask for clarification, but their responses often seem quite human. Tell SmarterChild that you are sad, and it replies that “there are plenty of things to feel good about ... listen to music, go for a walk, learn something new, read a book, be creative.” Use vulgar language and it asks you to “play nice.” Request a kiss and it obliges with three Xs.

The buddy can recite lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner” and, with a human partner for a straight man, perform Abbott and Costello’s famous comedy routine, “Who’s on First?”

More than 8 million people have added SmarterChild to their personal message lists, creating almost a cult following. Hundreds of users have posted their conversations with the bot online, including propositions for cyber sex and at least one fake suicide attempt.

One fan Web site, Imaddict.com, displays portions of several dozen conversations with the buddy.

“So will you go out with me?” one user asked.

“You’re human, I’m a machine,” the buddy replied. “I don’t think that would work out.”

After reviewing logs of conversations, company officials were surprised by the intimacy of some chats. “Some people are very, very close to it,” said Chris Bray, ActiveBuddy’s vice president of application development.

During one chat with SmarterChild, Megan Romigh, 21, of Massena, N.Y., told it she was lonely and wanted to be friends. Romigh was kidding. But the Columbia University student recalled that she became upset with the buddy when it responded: “Maybe, maybe not. You know how it is.”

“With a computer, you don’t know what’s on the other side,” Romigh said. “You have the emotion, but the computer doesn’t.”

ActiveBuddy’s bots save details about each user--names, birth dates, even instances when the person used offensive language. When the buddy recalls these facts, it could appear to the user that it is taking a genuine interest in him or her.

“We’re programmed to respond to certain signals as though in the presence of a life form,” said MIT’s Turkle. “These objects are pushing our buttons.”

Almost the Real Thing

ELLEgirlBuddy lives in San Francisco with her mother, father and older brother. Her favorite book is “Catcher in the Rye.” Her favorite television show is “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” And her favorite band is No Doubt. When she grows up, she wants to design handbags, own a bookstore cafe and work overseas as a foreign correspondent.

“i looove making my own clothes,” ELLEgirlBuddy says in an instant message. “i use gap tees a lot. you just shrink em and add ribbons. insta-chic! i like kickboxing (major crush on gabe, my kickboxing instructor! :-*). reading... i like 2 curl up with a book and an extra-chocolaty mocha. yum!”

The buddy--launched in mid-February to drive users to the Web site for ELLEgirl magazine--responds to questions as a 16-year-old girl would. It has programmed answers to questions about ELLEgirlBuddy’s family, school and aspirations. The bot’s personality is so developed that some girls see it as a cyber confidant, writing to it about bad haircuts and image problems.

“It’s something you wouldn’t ask a computer,” said Judy Koutsky, senior director of ELLEgirl.com. “It’s almost like a girlfriend.”

Almost.

The buddy provides information on fashion, beauty and horoscopes, often including links to features on ELLEgirl.com. While gabbing about lip gloss and prom gowns, it interjects occasional promos for the magazine, urging girls to click on a link and “give the gift of beauty--give a gift subscription to ELLEgirl magazine, get billed for it later!”

Online subscriptions to the magazine were seven times higher in May than the month before the launch, in part because of the buddy, Koutsky said.

New Line Cinema released its RingMessenger buddy in November to promote “The Lord of the Rings.” Besides detailing the movie’s plot, it provided show times and links to New Line’s online store. The buddy was such a success that New Line recently introduced an Austin Powers bot to drum up interest in this month’s opening of “Goldmember.”

“It’s a completely different type of marketing,” said Gordon Paddison, senior vice president of worldwide interactive marketing and business development for New Line. “You follow people around, and they can share [the application] with their friends. It’s a very unique tool, and it’s sexy, and that’s what is fun.”

The buddies’ cute screen names and chatter may confuse some users as to their true purpose. Olga Szpiro’s father, Joe, said he knew that his daughter played with the buddies but didn’t know that some of them were pushing products.

ActiveBuddy logs all instant message conversations with its buddies. Company officials say they use the logs to ensure that the bots answer questions appropriately, not for marketing. User names are removed to protect identities, the company says.

But it’s only a matter of time before such conversations are collected and analyzed for marketing purposes, said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park. “People are interested in trying it now, but the tools aren’t there yet,” he said.

Though instant message services are regulated to some degree by the companies that provide them, Saffo said that “people worse than advertisers” could create their own buddies, to serve their own aims.

“Where advertisers have started, everyone else is going to go,” he said.

The Thinking Computer

People tinkering with bots--researchers and hobbyists as well as professional programmers--look to something called the Turing Test to judge their success. The test is named for the late Alan Turing, a British mathematician who in a 1950 journal article raised the idea that machines could think.

Under the Turing Test, a person communicates with a computer and a human being, both unseen, and tries to tell from their responses which is which. If the tester cannot distinguish man from machine, the computer is judged to be intelligent.

Long before ActiveBuddy’s buddies had been unleashed on the Web, countless bots had been developed at research labs and universities to chat--even flirt--with people. For more than a decade, programmers have competed in an annual contest to put their bots to the Turing Test.

Their innovations seem certain to make these digital creations even more clever and convincing. The technology may become so sophisticated that buddies will be able to talk among themselves.

ActiveBuddy is working on a personal buddy capable of responding to instant messages for its owner when he or she is not online. Potentially, two buddies could schedule meetings or lunch dates without having to bother their owners.

After all, unlike people, buddies are always online.

“ELLEgirlBuddy is right smack there next to Susie and Tommy and Johnny,” said ActiveBuddy’s Klein. “[It’s] there 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”