Does Google Wave herald the arrival of natural language interaction with computers?
I’ve been spending some time recently thinking about Google Wave, and how it can be useful as a method of communicating and working with multiple participants at the same time, which is what Wave is for, but with a robot as one of those participants. Wave provides an easy way to incorporate a computer participant in a conversation with people, getting it to receive all updates to the wave and provide its own input. By doing this it makes performing workflow like tasks much easier, and brings the computer system into the conversation with the humans, rather than having the humans interact with a computer system. In my example, everybody has a “manager” to which their leave application must be sent before it can be approved. The bot would detect when you were finished with your application and automatically add in your manager for approval. This works great, but it needs to know who your manager is. This information is stored in the HR system, which has its own user interface and logins
