Just Write Click

Technical writing with Continuous Integration and docs-as-code

  • JustWriteClick
  • Contact
  • Books by Anne Gentle
  • Introducing Docs Like Code
You are here: Home / social media / Conversational robots

June 25, 2009 by annegentle

Conversational robots

Conversational robots
knittedrobot
Photo courtesy a voir etc...

Move over qmail mailer-daemon*, Little MOO from moo.com is my new favorite polite responder. Check out the auto-response I received after asking their support team a question using their webform. New favorite polite robot responder:

“Remember, I’m just a bit of software, so please don’t reply to this email. You’ll find our Service Agents far more conversational.”

Plain awesome. But obviously written by a human, unlike this robot chat program that won a prize last year for being most likely to fool people into thinking it was a human. The transcript of the robot’s “interview” is entertaining reading. They programmed it to be sarcastic and entertaining, which comes across as plain cheeky sometimes. Talk to him yourself at Elbot.com.

*In case you’re curious, the previous robot response winner for me is,

“Hi. This is the qmail-send program at mooseworld.org
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the
following addresses. This is a permanent error; I’ve given up.
Sorry it didn’t work out.”

Does anyone else have favorite automatic responses that you’ve written or received? Please do share.

Related

Filed Under: social media, writing Tagged With: conversational, email, mail, qmail, response, robot

More reading

Bubble graph showing sources of developer support data

I’ve been thinking a lot about developer support at Cisco recently, especially for the way the world works today with multiple cloud providers. This post is a re-publish of my talk from over five years ago, but the techniques and tools for listening and helping others are still true today. At Rackspace, we watched several […]

Cisco DevNet is our developer program for outreach, education, and tools for developers at Cisco. From the beginning, the team has had a vision for how to run a developer program. Customers are first, and the team implements what Cisco customers need for automation, configuration, and deployment of our various offerings. Plus, the DevNet team […]

I had a great talk with Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf Technical Writing consulting last week. Here are the show notes, full of links to all the topics we covered. Podcasts are great fun to listen to and participate in, if a bit nerve-wracking to think on your feet and make sure you answer questions succinctly […]

At the beginning of this year, I worked hard to summarize my thoughts on API documentation, continuous publishing, and technical accuracy for developer documentation. The result is an article on InfoQ.com, edited by Deepak Nadig, who also was forward-thinking in having me speak to a few teams at Intuit about API documentation coupled with code. Always […]

Recently on Just Write Click

  • A Flight of Static Site Generators: Sampling the Best for Documentation
  • Try a GPT about “Docs Like Code” to ask questions
  • Discipline and Diplomacy: Docs in the Open
  • Let’s Find Out: When Do Static Site Generators Do Rendering?
  • GitHub for Managing Tech Docs

Just Write Click in your Inbox

Enter your email address to subscribe to Just Write Click and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Read More

  • Privacy Policy
  • About Anne Gentle, developer experience expert
  • Books by Anne Gentle
    • Conversation and Community
    • Docs Like Code, a Book for Developers and Tech Writers
  • Woman in Tech Speaker Profile
  • Contact

Books

  • JustWriteClick
  • Contact
  • Books by Anne Gentle
  • Introducing Docs Like Code

Copyright © 2025 · WordPress · Log in