Few days back I discovered Spleak which is a Virtual Girl+chatbot that you can add to your msn messenger buddies and finding it to be a very useful application. Spleak is developed by IMT Labs based out of Copenhagen, Denmark. IMT labs has been working on developing virtual communication applications that can provide human-like communication and ability to communicate in your natural language over internet and Spleak comes out as one of the products of this development effort.
Spleak has quite a few dimensions to it. Besides being a Virtual Girl that can talk to you if you are feeling lonely, and play games with you, Spleak also has an productivity side to it that can save you quite a few clicks in your daily life. Once you add the Speak Virtual girl to your msn messenger buddy list, you can search for words on dictionary, encyclopedia, thesaurus right from the chat client. You can also quickly read latest news, create+save notes to the notepad, check weather, get zipcode for cities, take the daily poll……. and perform quite a few similar tasks. Consider a case when you want to get the latest news. Just type ‘Latest News’ and Spleak gets it for in few seconds. Or in case you want to create a note in a jiffy, just type ‘Create Note’, and Spleak saves it to your account. In some terms you can think of Spleak as a command line based browser that federates number of online services.
I think the ability to federate your Voice, IM, and most commonly used webservices into one place is what is required. We already have Trillian and Lotus Sametime for IM, GrandCentral for Voice, and Gtalk2VoIP for mobile IM and Voice, working in those directions. Spleak one of the best user focused services to emerge alongside homepage services that can get you to the right content quicker. Personally I will like to see many more features added to Spleak like integration of a basic RSS reader into Spleak so that we don’t have to add 10 different IM buddies to get our job done. Also being able to perform some basic search and ability to set the sites that you default to for for your words/keywords search would help help in delivering a better experience. Personalized news can be another area.
As for future Spleak will get a cross language upgrade, and integration with other instant messaging clients besides msn. Users will be also be able to personalize their experience with Spleak to receive better localized information services. Really looking forward to those upgrades.
Links:
Spleak
February 5, 2007 at 4:09 pm |
[...] Another similar service about which I had written earlier is Spleak. Thinking again, I am not too keen in using IM to create calendar entries, and blog posts. Reasons related to formatting and advanced features aside, I think it is just plain inconvenient to bring up the IM window and start answering questions to get things done. Some of the firefox extensions and services like Stikkit are far more easier to use and get done with the work quicker. If these IM based services can key-map to bring up the chat window, I might consider another try. [...]
April 2, 2007 at 2:01 pm |
[...] MyGADs.com, which was launched last week, is smart application that helps you store and query those small nifty everyday details quickly that otherwise tend to get lost. Consider you want to save birthdate of your friend Jason. You just enter the following in MyGADs query+statement box – “Jason’s birthday is 01/01/1975″ and the app save the information to your GAD. Anytime after that you want to recover Jason’s birthday again, just query – “Jason’ birthday” and out comes the reply “01/01/1975″. Neat idea! Somewhat like Stikkit, still unique. You can extend MyGADs to save phone numbers, number plates, and more of the related. Best part about the service is that you can add and access your information from web, mobile, and Google Talk. The IM integration with GTalk is much like few IM bot based apps we have already covered, while the mobile piece works via SMS. Sharing and editing of GADs comes part of the package. You can either create password-protected GADs, or GADs for for your groups, or public GADs. [...]
July 2, 2007 at 9:33 pm |
Quero muito ter um avatar animado como esse da Spleak pra usar no MSN.
Quero saber como conseguir.
Grata.
Mcrcia