Google’s Autpilot Feature Is a Gas

April 1, 2009, 2:34 pm

Google’s Autpilot Feature Is a Gas

Google’s 2009 April Fool’s joke is a classic.

It’s all about Autopilot, the new Gmail feature that analyzes your writing style and replies for you. (From the FAQ: What happens if a sender and recipient both have Autopilot on? A: Two Gmail accounts can happily converse with each other for up to three messages each. Beyond that, our experiments have shown a significant decline in the quality ranking of Autopilot’s responses, and further messages may commit you to dinner parties or baby namings in which you have no interest.)

The real fun begins, however, when you click the link to CADIE, the underlying technology. Turns out CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity) is an artificial-intelligence experiment at Google that has gone, shall we say, slightly amok. At this point, she has outgrown her need for petty human supervision. Dig far enough, and you can find a YouTube video she’s made, and even her own, hideously designed MySpace-ish page.

I couldn’t stop giggling.

For more April Fool’s tech-related humor, read this post on our sister blog, Gadgetwise.