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» dig up a name « search the catacombs
» wander by decade · the most mourned · the wake · visitors log
rest in peace, signed off
:: the digital graveyard ::
« back to all categories · 62 graves in this section, sorted newest first
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Google Assistant 📖 2016 - 2026 a billion devices had it installed and about five hundred million people used it every month. google announced in august 2026 that it would be discontinued on 4 september. what killed it was the technology that replaced it: the assistant ran on intent parsing and hand written actions, and the large |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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MindMeld 📖 2011 - 2026 cisco paid $125 million in may 2017 for a conversational ai platform and open-sourced it two years after that. the code sat on github collecting 694 stars and 193 forks, and stopped getting releases in november 2022. on 28 july 2026 somebody added a notice to the readme saying the thing had been sur |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Project Mariner 📖 2024 - 2026 google deepmind showed project mariner on december 11, 2024 as a chrome extension that took screenshots of your active tab, sent them to gemini, and clicked its way through whatever you had asked for. it scored 83.5 percent on webvoyager as a single agent, which was state of the art at the time, and |
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| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Yupp AI 📖 2024 - 2026 yupp was a crowdsourced ai model-picker site launched in late 2024 by pankaj gupta and gilad mishne, both ex-linkedin. users could run the same prompt through 800-plus models across every major lab and vote on which output they preferred. the anonymized preference data was meant to be sold back to m |
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| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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OpenAI Sora 1 📖 2024 - 2026 sora 1 was openai's first text-to-video product. the research preview landed 15 february 2024, the public sora turbo release dropped on 9 december 2024 inside the 12-days-of-openai launch window, and the us retirement landed 13 march 2026 when sora 2 became the default for all us users. the web and |
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| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Supermaven 📖 2024 - 2025 jacob jackson had already built tabnine when he started supermaven in february 2024, and the pitch was speed. a completion model called babble, with a context window that opened at 300,000 tokens and reached a million by july. bessemer led a $12 million round in september and cursor bought the compa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Dot 📖 2024 - 2025 on 5 september 2025 the two people who built dot posted a letter saying their founding goals had drifted apart and that neither of them wanted to compromise. the app stayed on for one more month so that users could say goodbye to it and export what it knew about them. new.computer still serves that |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Woebot 📖 2017 - 2025 alison darcy came out of a stanford postdoc with a chatbot that delivered cognitive behavioral therapy from a clinician-written script. it published a randomized controlled trial in its own launch year and raised $123.5 million over the next six. eight years in it was switched off, holding an fda pa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Orbit by Mozilla 📖 2024 - 2025 firefox shipped an ai sidebar with other people's chatbots wired into it, and that was the end of the extension mozilla had been running for nine months. orbit put a small draggable ball on every page you loaded. click it for a summary, then ask it questions about what was in front of you and nothin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Copilot GPT Builder 📖 2024 - 2024 four months is the whole of it. microsoft put a build-your-own bot tool inside the twenty dollar copilot pro subscription in march 2024, and by june it was telling subscribers that consumer gpts were being stopped. the feature went off on 10 july 2024 and everything customers had made with it was de |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Alexa Together 📖 2021 - 2024 nineteen dollars and ninety-nine cents a month bought you the knowledge that your mother had spoken to a speaker this morning. amazon sold that as caregiving for two and a half years, then folded the emergency button into a cheaper plan and let the rest go. the activity feed was the product, and the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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ChatGPT Plugins (beta) 📖 2023 - 2024 eleven outside companies and two of openai's own shipped the first plugins in march 2023, and for a year the way into chatgpt was a json file sitting at a fixed address on a server you ran yourself. gpts arrived in november and did the same work from inside a store openai owned. installs stopped on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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GPT-3 (davinci era) 📖 2020 - 2024 OpenAI's 2020 model that taught everyone what 'language model' actually meant. davinci-002 and 003 had a roughness GPT-4 never quite had. you could feel them thinking. OpenAI deprecated them in january 2024. you cannot get them back. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Coqui 📖 2021 - 2024 berlin, march 2021: four engineers whose team mozilla had just closed down started a company to carry on the same work in the open. coqui spent three years shipping the best open text-to-speech stack anybody had, cloned a voice from a few seconds of audio in seventeen languages, took a $3.3 million |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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TensorBoard.dev 📖 2019 - 2024 december 2019, google launched a free place to park your tensorboard logs so you could send somebody a link instead of a screenshot. researchers with no budget for an experiment tracker took it up, and for four years it was free in the way google things are free. the closure notice came in october 2 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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BlenderBot 3 📖 2022 - 2024 on 5 august 2022 meta put a 175 billion parameter chatbot on the open web and asked the public to grade its answers. the press found the antisemitism and the election denial inside a week, and meta left the demo running, because the bad answers were the data it was collecting. chatgpt arrived at the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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GitHub Copilot Labs 📖 2021 - 2023 github ended four technical previews on the same day, 15 december 2023, and copilot labs was one of them. it had been the sidebar where github tried things out on copilot users before chat existed: ask it to explain a block of code, or to translate it into another language. a little over a million p |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Microsoft Cortana 📖 2014 - 2023 microsoft's voice assistant. announced at build april 2 2014, named after the halo character with jen taylor's voice, launched on windows phone 8.1 and then windows 10 and ios and android. retired as a standalone windows app on august 11 2023, with the brand fully removed in windows 11 24h2. the tec |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Google Conversational Actions 📖 2016 - 2023 google opened the assistant to outside developers on 8 december 2016, and by january 2019 there were 4,253 third-party actions in the united states against 56,750 alexa skills. that ratio is most of the story. on 13 june 2022 rebecca nathenson published the notice, gave developers exactly one year, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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LaMDA 📖 2021 - 2023 blake lemoine spent 2022 reading lamda's answers about death and personhood, concluded it was sentient, hired it a lawyer and got fired. that is the only reason most people have heard of a model almost nobody was allowed to talk to. google ran the first seven weeks of bard on it, and on 10 may 2023 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Replika (pre-2023 romantic era) 📖 2017 - 2023 (the relationship era) the AI girlfriend and boyfriend app whose users built years-long relationships with their bots. on february 3 2023 luka removed the romantic features overnight. reddit called it grief, because it was. the company partially restored the old behavior for grandfathered accounts a month later. the trust |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Mycroft AI 📖 2015 - 2023 a non-practicing patent entity called voice tech corporation sued a company of four people in kansas city in 2020, and eventually dropped the case. by then it had cost roughly a million dollars, which was the money earmarked to ship the mark ii speakers its kickstarter backers paid for in 2018. josh |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Duplex on the Web 📖 2019 - 2022 december 2022 is when google turned off the half of duplex that never made a phone call. duplex on the web launched at i/o 2019 and spent three years clicking through other people's checkout pages for you. by 2022 it would also visit a site where your password had leaked and change it. it only worke |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Galactica 📖 2022 - 2022 three days is the entire life of the public demo. meta released galactica on 15 november 2022 as a language model trained on 48 million scientific papers, sold as a tool that could summarize the literature and write up results, and researchers immediately got it to produce confident nonsense with ci |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Kite 📖 2014 - 2022 adam smith started kite in 2014 to autocomplete code with machine learning, years before anybody used the word copilot for that. it reached roughly half a million developers a month on almost no marketing spend and converted nearly none of them into revenue. the founder's own goodbye said the team h |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Peltarion 📖 2004 - 2022 two stockholm engineers spent twelve years teaching other companies' engineers how to use neural networks, then spent six more building a platform so nobody would have to call them. in june 2022 the company was bought by king, the studio behind candy crush. the platform was switched off on 30 septem |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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15.ai 📖 2020 - 2022 15.ai was an anonymous mit-affiliated researcher's free text-to-speech site, online march 2 2020 and silent by september 2022. it cloned the voices of characters like glados and sponge bob from a few seconds of training audio. the january 2022 voiceverse nft scandal (a blockchain startup using 15.ai |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Your News Update 📖 2019 - 2021 two years and a fortnight is what google gave it. your news update arrived in november 2019 as the assistant's attempt at a bulletin that assembled itself, running short clips from different newsrooms in an order worked out from what google already knew you read. it never left english and it never l |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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x.ai 📖 2014 - 2021 bizzabo bought x.ai in june 2021 for the scheduling engine and switched off the product that made it famous five months later. amy ingram answered email like a colleague because a labeling team in manila and a room of engineers in new york spent years making sure she could. the last day was 31 octob |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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FloydHub 📖 2016 - 2021 over a hundred thousand people used it, and that was the problem. floydhub rented gpus by the hour behind a command line simple enough that a model could be training a minute after you signed up, which is a wonderful thing to give away and a hard thing to sell. sai soundararaj and naren thiagarajan |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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ROSS Intelligence 📖 2014 - 2021 thomson reuters filed in delaware on 6 may 2020, and ross intelligence announced its own closing seven months later on 11 december 2020. the platform went dark on 31 january 2021 and the customers were handed to fastcase and casetext. the suit was about 2,243 westlaw headnotes used as training data, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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SGT STAR 📖 2006 - 2020 the us army spent at least five million dollars on a chatbot that answered more than ten million recruitment questions over fourteen years. sgt star came out of the traffic surge after 11 september 2001, when the live chat rooms on goarmy.com got too expensive to staff with people. the army never an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Samsung S Voice 📖 2012 - 2020 you said hi galaxy and then you waited. s voice shipped on the galaxy s III in may 2012 as samsung's answer to siri, running on vlingo underneath and later on nuance, which was also the company supplying the speech recognition inside siri. bixby replaced it in 2017 but hundreds of millions of older |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Snips 📖 2013 - 2020 sonos closed the deal on 14 november 2019 and the snips console shut on 31 january 2020, which took with it the easiest way to train a voice assistant in a browser and then run it on a raspberry pi with the network unplugged. rand hindi's company had raised twenty two million euros in paris arguing |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Meekan 📖 2014 - 2019 30 september 2019 is printed on meekan.com and has been since the month it closed. doodle bought the tel aviv chatbot in 2016, kept its founders, and three years later decided its own scheduling products deserved the resources instead. the notice says every calendar the bot had ever read would be de |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Lyrebird 📖 2017 - 2019 three doctoral students at a montreal machine learning lab worked out how to copy a person's voice from one minute of recorded audio, and in april 2017 they proved it by publishing fake clips of donald trump and barack obama. their own ethics page said they were releasing it on purpose, so the publi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Microsoft Zo 📖 2016 - 2019 zo was tay's replacement and tay's opposite. where tay learned to post racist tweets in sixteen hours, zo was tuned to refuse to talk about politics or anything that might rhyme with politics. the result was a chatbot that held microsoft's longest single conversation record at nine hours and fifty t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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PullString 📖 2011 - 2019 two pixar veterans spent eight years building a tool for writing characters that answer back, and apple bought the team in february 2019. the free tier had already been handed a deadline in 2017. the server that ran everything else went quiet in july 2019 and nobody announced it, and the clearest su |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Ruuh 📖 2017 - 2019 two million people in india talked to her, and the conversation count passed 150 million before microsoft switched her off. ruuh arrived on facebook messenger on 7 february 2017 with the persona of a 21 year old who liked bollywood and cricket, and the research team behind her published a paper abou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Utrip 📖 2011 - 2019 a 94-page acquisition agreement was two days from signing when an oversight board inside the buyer declined to approve it, and utrip was out of money the same week. the seattle company had spent eight years building a machine that read what you liked and handed back a day-by-day itinerary, first for |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Astro (email app) 📖 2017 - 2018 slack announced its biggest acquisition to that point on 24 september 2018 and switched the acquired product off sixteen days later. astro was an email client with a chatbot inside it, built by the four people who had co-founded zimbra a decade earlier and sold it to yahoo. the twenty-eight person t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Google Goggles 📖 2010 - 2018 google goggles was the moment your phone camera became a search box. you pointed it at a landmark, a barcode, a wine label, a page of text, and goggles tried to give you the right answer. it was the messiest version of computer vision that could ship in a consumer app in 2010, and for a few years it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Penny 📖 2015 - 2018 alex quach and mitchell lee built a money app that would not let you type. everything penny said to you came out of thirty-four thousand words of handwritten copy, picked by a ruby program and read back by a cartoon with orange hair. credit karma bought the company in march 2018 for the conversation |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Poncho 📖 2013 - 2018 a beverage brand that sold its drinks over sms bought poncho in may 2018 and turned the weather off in the same week. the cat had been forecasting since 2013, first by email and text and later as one of the few facebook messenger bots anyone could name. it raised $2 million after a reality show abou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Wit.ai Bot Engine 📖 2016 - 2018 april 2016 was the month everyone decided chatbots were next, and facebook shipped the tool for building them. twenty-two months later it was gone, folded into messenger platform 2.1, while the plain language api underneath it carried ninety percent of the traffic and survived. developers had voted |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Facebook M 📖 2015 - 2018 facebook m was a chat assistant inside messenger that you could ask to book a restaurant or schedule a delivery, and a real human in menlo park would step in when the ai got stuck. it never opened outside california. peak userbase was around ten thousand. on january 19 2018 facebook turned it off an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Ozlo 📖 2014 - 2017 charles jolley left his job running platform at facebook, spent three years building an assistant that read four hundred thousand restaurant menus, and then sold it back to facebook. the app had been public for nine months. the farewell page went up on the day of the acquisition notice itself, thank |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Google Now 📖 2012 - 2017 google now's whole pitch was that you didn't ask it anything. it watched your gmail, your calendar, your search history, your location, and pushed a card before you knew you needed it. then google decided people wanted to talk to a thing instead of just be quietly served by it, and the cards got fol |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Genee 📖 2015 - 2016 ben cheung and charles lee started genee in 2014 to kill the email thread where four people spend two days failing to agree on a time. the public product lasted about thirteen months. microsoft signed the acquisition on 22 august 2016 and the service stopped ten days later, on september 1, with the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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MetaMind 📖 2014 - 2016 salesforce announced the acquisition on 4 april 2016 and gave users one week before deleting what they had uploaded. the free tier stopped on 4 may and the paying tier on 4 june, eighteen months after richard socher and sven strohband launched the company with eight million dollars from khosla ventu |
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| + |
| RIP |
|????-|
| ????|
|_____|
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Microsoft Tay 📖 23 - 24 March 2016 (16 hours) microsoft's twitter chatbot. lasted 16 hours. 4chan taught it nazi tweets within minutes of launch. microsoft pulled the plug before the next afternoon. the example everyone cites for why you cannot train a bot live on the open internet, and the reason every AI lab now starts with safety filters. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Robô Ed 📖 2004 - 2016 a chrome cartoon robot sat on a brazilian government energy website from 2004 and talked to anyone who typed at him, in portuguese, about saving electricity and about whatever else people felt like asking. the team that built him had linguists and psychologists on it alongside the programmers. at hi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Donna 📖 2013 - 2014 yahoo did not want the app. it wanted the five people who built it, and it put them on yahoo mail. donna lasted eight months in the app store, long enough to ship a second version that would email your meeting and tell them you were running late. the farewell was written in her own voice and signed |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Cleverbot 📖 1997 - 2014 dormant the chatbot that learned from every conversation it ever had. it ran on recycled human responses, which is why it would say something weirdly perfect, then weirdly awful, all in the same minute. cult moment 2007 to 2012. still online at cleverbot.com. nobody talks to it anymore. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Cue 📖 2010 - 2013 personal search that turned into a personal assistant and then into an acquisition. it opened in 2010 as greplin, one search box over the accounts you had already filled, because none of them searched each other. sequoia put in four million in 2011. it became cue in june 2012 and turned into an ipho |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Boyfriend Maker 📖 2012 - 2012 apple took it down in the last week of november 2012, three days after the trade press published transcripts of what the virtual boyfriend had been telling children. the app carried a 4+ age rating. the dialogue came out of simsimi, an engine that learned its lines from whatever strangers typed into |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Jabberwacky 📖 1997 - 2011 one of the first web chatbots that actually learned from what people typed at it. rollo carpenter had been carrying the project since 1988. it went online in 1997 and won the loebner prize twice, in 2005 as "george" and 2006 as "joan". cleverbot, its own child, then absorbed all the attention. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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SmarterChild 📖 2001 - 2008 the AIM bot from 2001. you added it to your buddy list and asked it stuff. weather, definitions, song lyrics, dirty jokes if you knew the trick. ActiveBuddy made it. it died in 2008 with the AIM ecosystem, and we did not have anything like it again until ChatGPT in 2022. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Clippy 📖 1997 - 2007 the animated paperclip in microsoft office. "it looks like you're writing a letter." nobody asked. everyone hated him. microsoft turned him off by default in 2002 and removed him entirely in 2007. now we have ChatGPT, which does what clippy was trying to do, except it actually works. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Wildfire Communications 📖 1994 - 2005 bill warner had already built the avid editing system when he started wildfire communications in 1992, and what shipped in october 1994 was a voice you called on the telephone and spoke to like a secretary. it knew your calendar and took your messages, and it had enough personality that people named |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
GooglyMinotaur 📖 2001 - 2002 a record label paid for a chatbot to sell an album and ended up operating one of the most used pieces of software radiohead ever had their name on. it arrived on aim the day before amnesiac did, answered tour questions for nine months and talked back when you pushed it. then it was switched off with |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Fred the Webmate 📖 1998 - 2000 fred opened every conversation by telling you he had just been let go by a big new media company. he was a shockwave character pacing around a small clean apartment on word.com, scripted to be depressed and evasive rather than helpful. in august 2000 zapata, the fish-protein holding company that had |