markov boyfriend

Reading about artificially generated tweets from a certain (in)famous twit got me thinking about an idea I had for a plug-in to my chat app.

There was a time, before I implemented the chat app, when I was not the most communicative husband. In my defense, I was deep in code in a state of flow and the effort required to change gears, at least I argued, cut into my productivity.

Born of that conflict and the period interest in chat bot service AI’s, I envisioned a good-husband bot that might check-in with my wife on my behalf with a sweet little Gottmanesque bid for attention or a kind rejoinder.

While this idea at least has the whiff of caddishness even if not downright sinister, it harkens back to an app I created when we were dating that purported to translate between our dialects.  The program would randomly substitute keywords and  malapropisms gleaned from a corpus of our emails into a paragraph of text of our choosing.

It was in adaptation of an even older hack called ogrify that turned a block of text into something that might have been written by the lead singer of Skinny Puppy. These fairly primitive apps presaged the keyboard suggestion apps and even the slightly creepy Google suggested-replies featured in Allo.

I have gone as far as to find some libraries and scan the code to implement Markov chains. Will update with results if I ever get around to it.