Robô Ed

» see ed.conpet.gov.br as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Ed spoke Portuguese and nothing else, and his job was talking to Brazilian schoolchildren about not wasting electricity. Two good reasons he was never going to reach a machine in Ankara. He surfaced for me in 2026, while I was working through chatbots older than the ones everyone argues about now, and he turned out to be older and considerably weirder than most of the names people reach for.

CONPET, the energy conservation program Petrobras runs, put him online in 2004. The name is an initialism: Energia e Desenvolvimento. Sergio Carreiras did the character design and the 3D modeling, and what he produced was a chrome robot with an enormous grin and two antennae, a Petrobras logo across his chest, parked in the corner of a government website. The conversation engine came from a Brazilian company called Inbot.

He was built for children. The team behind him included linguists and psychologists working next to the programmers, and the stated purpose was a channel for teaching the public, mostly kids, about conserving energy and natural resources. Underneath, he was keyword matching against a stored knowledge base with some pattern recognition on top, which is roughly what everything of that era was.

At his busiest he answered a million questions in a single day.

~ the record ~

~ how he worked ~

Classical natural language processing over a large hand-built base of stored answers, with textual pattern matching deciding which one you got. Brazilian academic work cites him as one of the first Brazilian chatbots to use these techniques in a corporate setting with real visibility, which is the polite way of saying he was the first one millions of people actually met.

The design decision that matters is that he answered everything. You typed a sentence and got a sentence back, and if the sentence was about football or about what he thought of your school he had something stored for that too. The energy curriculum was the reason he existed. The open conversation was the reason anyone came back.

~ what people actually did with him ~

He went on tour. There are photographs of a CONPET truck with Ed painted down the side, and of school computer labs with a whole class lined up at the machines typing at him. There is one of uniformed personnel queuing at an aerospace research center for a turn. A children's comic was drawn around him, and he got seasonal versions of himself for Independence Day and for Arbor Day.

Most of what Brazilians who were online in that decade remember about Ed involves trying to make him say something he should not. That was the standard game with every chatbot of the period and Ed absorbed a country's worth of it for twelve years without ever getting into trouble that anyone recorded.

~ the quiet retirement ~

The service ended in 2016. No date was published and no farewell was written. The Portuguese Wikipedia entry gives the year and nothing else. A state energy program had run a conversational agent for over a decade and simply stopped paying for it.

Seven years later Brazilian outlets started writing him up again as the grandfather of the current thing, which is what happens to every dead assistant once the category gets fashionable.

The comparison flatters Ed, who was matching keywords against answers somebody typed by hand. The number underneath it needs no flattering at all. A million questions in a day, on a state website about turning off the lights.

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