Running an event can be a lot of work, and can leave you with little time to help your attendees discover one of the greatest values you have provided: finding great connections.

Avatar Factory provides special features to help use Avatars to facilitate business and social networking:

• Avatars can chat with your attendees before the event to learn about them. AI chat provides a much better experience than a form, as the AI can coach the person towards great responses.
• Before, or at the event, attendees can discover which other people are similar or complimentary.
• You can ask an event volunteer to act as a Matchmaker, to help review the AI generated matches and then make live introductions. This human touch makes the event so much warmer and welcoming.

Step 1: Create Your Matchmaker Avatar

Avatars power the guided conversations, which are chats in which the Avatar/AI has intention and guides the user towards a known goal. For a business networking event there might be two goals: learn about the person's new company, and learn what the person would like to get from the event.

1. Open the Avatar Factory web app on your laptop (having the big screen will really help)
2. If you don't have an account, then create one with your phone number, or login in with your Google account (from the home screen, tap the bottom right "More" tab, then the blue "Login" button)
3. Once you are logged in, visit the details screen of the Business Networking Matchmaker
4. Tap the "Clone" button
5. Edit the "Title" to the name you would like
6. Scroll down to the "Create Clone" button and tap it - your Avatar is now created!

While this Avatar is ready to use and you can start chatting with it, you probably want to make some changes like adding it to the Avatar Factory catalog so people can discover it, and setting the name of the event. Follow the instructions in the next section to do these and much more.

Step 2: Edit Your New Avatar For Your Event

Here are some basic ways to update your Avatar.

From the Edit Avatar screen:

• Edit the Title to match your event and business
• Edit the Nickname which is used during chats
• Edit the Tagline which is shown along with the title when the Avatar appears in lists on the web app
• For now, DO NOT edit the Content which is the English-as-programming of your Avatar. This is an advanced topic and covered in the Editing Content section below
• Edit the Abstract which is shown on your Avatar detail screen
• Choose the Categories your Avatar will appear under. At least make sure the Matchmaking category is selected.
• Decide if you want to show your Avatar in the public catalog
• Decide if you want to make the details of your Avatar open source - which means other people can see all the details of your avatar including the content

After editing, make sure to tap the "Update Avatar" button to save your changes.

You can also change the Avatar logo from the Avatar detail screen. Tap the Change Logo row and select the photo or picture you want to use.

Let's Test Your Avatar!

1. Tap the "More" bottom tab, and then "My Avatars" from the More screen
2. Find your new Avatar from the list and tap the chat icon to the left of it
3. Start chatting!

Share Your New Avatar With a Friend

To share your Avatar, start a chat with it, and then use the "share" option from your web browser, or tap the top right "Share" icon (the three dots with two line between them).

Anyone who receives this share link can directly open the chat. If they have already logged in, then they can start chatting immediately. If they don't have an account they will be prompted to log in with a Google account, or provide their phone number and receive an one-time-password link through SMS.

Choose Some Human Matchmakers For Your Event

While this is optional, it does provide two great benefits:

• Many times your volunteers will love to be matchmakers because it helps them network, and is a fun way to meet new people
• Your attendees will love the white glove customer service, of a real person listening to their personal needs and making real-life introductions. They don't need to wander into random conversations hoping to find a connection, but instead can enjoy a curated meeting

To give someone matchmaker permissions for your Avatar:

1. Visit the Avatar detail screen
2. Click on "Admin Avatar"
3. Tap the (+) to add a contributor
4. Select the people from the list that you want to be Matchmakers - make sure to checkbox each one. Then tap the "Next" button
5. From the Avatar Admin screen, change the permission of each Matchmaker to "read" (Otherwise they can edit your Avatar!)

Use the Avatar for Matchmaking at an Event

Once you are happy with your Avatars behavior, you can share it with your event attendees. There's just two simple steps:

1. Share the link to your Avatar chat with your attendees, and ask them to chat with it until they get a "success" badge
2. At your event, ask someone to be the Matchmaker, and make them a "Contributor" to your Avatar so they can see list all the people who chatted with the Avatar.

Step 3: Advanced Ways to Modify Your Avatar

Advanced settings and features should be changed with the help of a prompt engineer. They require the use of additional tools and techniques to determine the settings and to test.

• Edit the Content - this is the English Programming of your Avatar and tells the Avatar how to guide the conversation, which advice to give, and how to know when the user has provided enough information to let the conversation proceed. We frequently use ChatGPT or Gemini to write these sections.
• Choose a Prompt Strategy - this is a combination of a specific Prompt Script, and the back-end business logic to run it. For matchmaking we use the matchmaker strategy and you shouldn't need to change this.
• Edit the Prompt Script - you can override any of the scripts from the prompt strategy or default prompt script to give your improve your avatars performance.

I've been going to a lot of business networking events in the hopes of finding great people to work with, customers, partnerships, and general support from like-minded people.

But at every event it seems like serendipity is king, and I have to rely on luck to find the right people - it's really more of a random walk. When I ask event hosts for introductions they are often too busy running the event, have a long line of people ahead of me for their time, or they are prioritizing their existing relationships.

I've asked my friends who are great at networking, and their advice is to review the LinkedIn profiles of the attendees before the events. For events with hundreds of people that's a lot of work, and many events don't even publish the info... So it's back to my random walk with my best friend Serendipity.

Wouldn't it be great if at every event the host greeted me as I walked in, took a few minutes to get to know me, and then made introductions?

Yes.

So I spent the last week modifying the Avatar Factory web app and SaaS backend to provide a blended experience - where AI takes the time to get to know you, figures out good matches, and answers a bunch of "what if" questions - and combines that with real people, our matchmakers, who can provide the human touch at events and make warm introductions.

Here's the process in a nutshell from the event organizer perspective:

1. Event organizer clones a Matchmaker Avatar on Avatar Factory (one click of the "clone" button)
2. If the event organizer wants to customize the Avatars behavior (what they ask of the attendee, how the answers are interpreted, etc.) they can do some prompt engineering which is all in English
3. The organizer then shares the Avatar link with the attendees (any web browser can open)
4. Attendees chat with the Avatar before the event and are coached towards good answers
5. At the event, volunteers - the human Matchmakers - use the Avatar Factory app to view all the attendees, see the matches, use AI to answer deeper questions, and then personally introduce people

It's important to note the event doesn't have to have human matchmakers. Any attendee can use the app to list all their matches, ask the AI additional questions about the people, and use profile pictures to find them in the room.

From an attendee perspective the AI matchmaker has so many advantages:

• Talking to an AI matchmaker before the event gives people a mirror for how they are presenting themself, and AI can help coach them towards the best version of themself
• Attendees can customize their profile for that exact event - something that can't be done with LinkedIn with their common profile across all events (some people have days jobs and are there for moonlighting their new startup ;)
• Before the event, attendees can familiarize themselves with who else is going using the deeper and focused descriptions of other attendees. AI can assist the evaluations using the "Ask" feature about specific people.
• Just as spreadsheets provided "what-if" for numbers, AI matchmakers provide "what-if's" for people. You can adjust your profile and see how that affects your matches - fine-tune your event persona!
• AI can help understand how good the matches are (using the "Explain" and "Ask" features). Save time by avoiding the bad connections, and finding the great ones

I am really excited to be releasing these new features today and looking forward to feedback from this week's events!

This year's presidential election is going to be a roller-coaster and the result will have a global impact. Everyone is going to be watching.

People are anxious and want to talk about their views, but it can be so polarizing that it can tear apart friendships and families. I heard about one such person who was feeling lonely because of their political perspective, so I created an Avatar aligned with their views that they could talk to. Wanting to be fair, I created another Avatar for the other party.

And then Wedge Martin suggested we have the two Avatars debate each-other. Queue up a weekend hacking session.

The debate feature is still in beta, but you can try it for Trump vs. Biden. I had considered doing an "auto-play" so each side would just keep on chatting, but I found it much more pleasant to read one message from each candidate and then have a button to start the next round.

After a few days of tweaking the candidate positions, prompt scripts, and prompt logic, they are starting to be pretty... entertaining.

Derek has added a few of the other presidential candidates: Jill Stein, RFK Jr., and Cornel West. And drawing inspiration from this last weekend's Saturday Night Live episode, we also added RFK's brain worm to the debate. Yes, you can now watch RFK debate with his own brain worm, or pit the brain worm against Trump!

You can find all these matchups on the new Avatar Factory home screen. Or you can create any matchup you want by first starting a chat with an avatar, and then pressing the +person icon on the lower right toolbar. If you enjoy a debate you have created please consider sharing it with a friend!

On a more serious note...

While the debate feature is very fun, it opens the door to many other possibilities. You should be able to chat with any political candidate to learn more about their views. You should also be able to discuss any proposition on a ballot.

I also believe these simulations will make us challenge the candidates to be better. My first pass with using Google's Gemini resulted in very intelligent, considerate, and concise debates. While technically very good from a debate perspective, they seemed so unreal - people aren't robots, they are emotional and reactive and sometimes say things that aren't well thought through. Wait, isn't that kind of a bad thing? What will our new standards be?

Avatar Factory is a platform to create your own Avatars. I'm hoping people take these starting Avatars, clone them, and morph them in every way possible so we can see all the ways these candidates could, and maybe should, answer questions about their platforms and interact with each other. And perhaps then, with that rich perspective, we can cast more informed votes and benefit from better leadership.

Intentional AI conversations are going to drive an incredible level of engagement with voters in this election year. Put on your seat-belt, it's going to be the ride of a lifetime!

Ever since we created the first talking book two months ago, people have been suggesting fantastic uses for the technology. We have evolved the central metaphor into avatars, and the over-arching theme into Intentional AI.

Three groups of people are excited to apply Intentional AI to real world problems, are we have forked our web application into three discrete products to support those efforts:

• Smarter Dating for Dating
• Talking Books for authors, publishers and their readers
• The Avatar Factory for community generated Daily Conversations

While all three sites share the common ability to easily discover, create, and chat with avatars, each site provides special features for its users. For example, Smarter Dating provides a conversational tool to create dating Liaisons (avatars) and the ability to place Liaisons on a map for others to discover and chat with.

Smarter Dating

Smarter Dating's goal is "No More First Dates" and makes it easy to create dating assistants that talk to dating matches in place of a first date. If the match is able to convince your dating assistant they are worth your time, then you can connect with the match and plan a follow up call or real world second date.

Talking Books

Talking Books is a platform for book authors and publishers to create additional engagement with their readers. It harnesses the potential of AI to move beyond static pages to dynamic conversations.

Avatar Factory

Avatar Factory is a community of avatar creators and the people who love interacting with those avatars. The Daily Conversations provides meaningful conversations to start your day, and the political category (one of many) lets you engage with your favorite politicians. A favorite feature is the ability to have avatars chat with each other - so if Biden won't debate Trump, you can let their avatars do it!

We hosted a Meetup focused on Smarter Dating with AI in Los Altos at Le Banc. It was our first Meetup and a chance to share our ideas with and get some great feedback.

Our format was to give a quick introduction to AI, then and overview of the different AI services people are using for dating, and then we did a deep dive into the Talking Books service.

With Talking Books we created five different books that would try to understand a persons perspective on dating from a specific angle: men looking for women, women looking for men, Christian, and finally poly/ENM.

The idea was for a person to find a book that was close to their approach on dating, and then to clone the book and modify it to their exact liking. Then they would release the book into the wild, and see who it found.

We gathered a lot of really great feedback about the concept, service, metaphors, and usability - thank you to everyone who joined us!

We've been talking to everyone we can about Talking Books, and listening carefully to their feedback. While we love the idea that there is buried treasure in all the books already written, and that wisdom can be applied to guide conversations, people seem to get consistently confused about what a talking "book" means.

We built a big spreadsheet of metaphors, ChatGPT'd for ideas on alternatives, and asked everyone (and their mothers) to uncover the better alternative.

And then Derek asked his son Sidney. Without hesitation, Sidney said "Avatars".

We took a few days to brew on this as we prepared for the Smarter Dating with AI Meetup we were hosting. Based on feedback from the Meetup and much deliberation, we decided to try out the avatar angle. We bought the AvatarFactory.AI domain and put a web app and this blog up.

Early feedback on the change has been very positive... let's see where this goes!

Huan hosted our first company BBQ at his beautiful home in the Los Gatos Mountains. Beside our core team of Derek, Huan, Wedge, and myself, we were joined by friends and family. Taline and Kent brought our two youngest Avatar creators Maria (7) and Lara (13). Ted and Laaya came to give us more support and enjoy the beautiful evening.

We are looking forward to many more gatherings as the team grows!

We were lucky to be invited to present at AICamp in SF on March 14th. We were joined by Dr. Shradha Agarwal who discussed computer vision and Joshua Barney who dug into the legal side of AI and important areas to consider.

On the presentation side, we did a quick overview of Talking Books, our focus on mental health, and a demo of publishing and prompt engineering. Victoria, the author of "How to get over your Ex" joined us, along with Derek Puleston who is evangelizing the service and helping authors integrate their books.

After the talk we we were greeted by a long line people with questions and enthusiasm about what we are doing. It was great validation of the ideas and we can't wait to see where this goes!

Before smartphones, people used to read books and socialize a lot more. We might even argue it was "better back then".

And then big business stepped in, and realized these smartphones could provide amazingly addictive experiences, which leads to fantastic corporate profits. People's mental health was a distant concern.

And here we are. Society is still grappling with the depth of our situation. Parents are raising children with few digital guardrails, and every day we doom scroll to feed our dopamine addictions.

I do believe it is going to get better. Not overnight, but slowly, people will become aware of the "good" apps and bad ones. We will self limit. We will guard our children. It will be the equivalent of moving from a fast food nation to one that eats healthy home cooked meals, while enjoying the company of our family.

Books will Evolve

Books used to provide our escape, leveraging the minds eye to take us on fantastic journeys and learn about complex subjects. But reading takes time, and it's possible our fling with social media has caused us to lose a valuable skill: patience. We need "it" now - no time to read a whole book.

Books are valuable: they embody a carefully crafted wisdom of the author. Words are chosen carefully. And self-help books provide a unique guidance. If we don't have time to read them, what is the alternative?

AI Provides two ways to experience a book

The first way is very Google like: ask AI a question about most anything, and the AI will work to provide a pretty good answer. Services like ChatGPT and Gemini are leading the way on this experience. This is primarily customer guided questions.

The second way turns the tables. Instead of a person asking the AI questions, the AI, guided by the wisdom of the author, asks the person questions and guides them toward an intentional outcome.

Talking Books

We now have an opportunity to leverage the wisdom in countless books to provide an engaging and positive experience for people. No, it can't replace the dopamine fueled doom scrolling, but that was bad for us and humans are learning. We are aware of how we are being gamed, and increasingly strive for a growth mindset and to be intentional with our time.

Benevolent AI, designed to help us be better people, is going to take us out of these digital dark ages and foster a renaissance unlike any other.

After spending a few weeks hacking an AI powered dating app, the user experience was getting more complicated than I had hoped (badges, coaches, tokens, ratings). This was taking me further away from the core idea I wanted to explore: using natural language to drive a conversation to help a person.

So I took a step back, pulled out the dating elements, and rebranded as Talking Books.AI

Talking Books is very much a work in progress, and I'm going to focus on the best way to support authors writing and testing talking books. If you have a book that is well suited for driving conversations with people please let me know!

Two weeks after the Google Developer Group AI DevFest, Mariane, Hafsa, and Tanya hosted a GPT Hackathon.

I was lucky enough to be partnered with Rashmi Thakur who helped develop our demo of talking books.

We decided to build on the Ready to Date webapp I'd been hacking for the last two weeks and adapt it to a use case Mariane suggested - Helping parents deal with their kids. Rashmi imported the some relevant sections from the Resilience Booster: Parent Tip Tool from the American Psychological Association.

We then spent the majority of our time engineering the prompt for the GPT-4 OpenAI model to properly use our reference document and engage the user with incremental and helpful questions.

Even with our minimal prompt engineering the results were impressive - we can't wait to give the prompts a proper tune and couple them with comprehensive documents.

The icing on the cake was winning 4th place in the hackathon (thank you judges!)

For the GPT Hackathon I was looking for an idea that could have a positive impact on many people. I've been curious about how to improve the dating scene for people who are looking for healthy long term relationships, and a recurring observation is that many people aren't even ready to date (despite that fact they think they are!)

I built ReadyToDate in two weeks in React Native for web, and leveraged the code from several other AI apps I'd written in 2023.

Ready to Date is a proof of concept, and I'd like to explore:

• Can AI be used to assess if people, through a conversation, meet some acceptance criteria (being ready to date in this example)
• Would "badges" issued by AI or a real person be a good way to vouch that a person is ready to date
• How would giving the other person on a date the ability to provide feedback, affect the date? Would people be kinder, nicer, more of a gentleman or lady?

I will continue to develop the Ready to Date app and see if people find it useful. If you have any comments or feature requests, please let me know. Thank you!

On January 23rd the Google Developer Group in Mountain View hosted an AI DevFest. During separate interviews with Peter Norvig and Rocky Yu, a common theme was discussed: In the future, computers will be programmed using natural language.

While I know large language models are trained on enormous sets of natural language documents, and assistants like Siri have been using increasingly complicated human commands to carry out tasks, I think Peter and Rocky were alluding to something far bigger: 1) using a natural language document with complex ideas and domain specific knowledge, and having AI focus on solving a problem using that document, 2) the natural language document was intended to be read by AI

The future is human authors writing books for AI to read, and AI using those books to drive conversations with a users. We won't read books anymore - we will talk with them to solve problems.

Back to the DevFest... I was fortunate to meet the event hosts, including Mariane Bekker. Mariane mentioned a hackathon she was hosting in two weeks and encouraged me to go. That evening the ideas from Peter and Rocky fully sunk in and I started working on a prototype for the hackathon.

An area I'm very keen to address is mental health, and more specifically loneliness. I believe a key way to solve loneliness is to help people find healthy long term relationships, for which most people turn to dating apps.

I've long thought that many relationships don't work out because people don't really know what they want, they don't know what they will bring to the table, and their expectations are too high. In short, they aren't ready to date. This imperfection benefits dating apps as the users continuously fall back into the dating loop. I want to help them break free!

So the plan was hatched. Create an app that helps people get ready to date, that uses AI, and is powered by books authored by non-programmers such as psychologists. I don't think there is "one way" to figure this out, so the app would let anyone write a book about anything, and then the app would let people chat with the book of their choice to solve their problems.

Much Bigger than Dating

I'm excited about talking books because the idea covers every book. This is a massive expansion of prompt engineering, as books will be tuned to speak clearly to AI, which in turn will provide these amazingly beneficial conversations. I imagine domain specific authors such as psychologists, teachers, coaches, and engineers working side-by-side with prompt engineers to develop books.

For now, I'm going to evangelize this idea, while burning the midnight oil to develop proofs of concept. While breaking the dating loop is a fun idea, I'd love to explore so many other ways of helping people, especially when it comes to mental health. If you have a new idea you'd like to brainstorm, please reach out to me. Thank you!