On the https://couple.me/alice page, to make text appear a little at a time they setup a long series of timeouts set to trigger at different times (as you can see here: https://couple.me/javascripts/alice.js). They are not dependent on each other.
This leads to unusual behavior if you do something as simple as tab away while one of them is playing for about 10 seconds. On both Chrome and Firefox, that will result in, when you tab back, complete gibberish as multiple timeouts that triggered while you were away both begin "typing" their text. I think the correct solution here is to have all callbacks drawing text depend on the previous one completing (since there's no overlaps, this should work well enough).
That entire sequence also felt very trite to me, but I can see how it could be appealing.
I opened it on mobile and it was all extremely laggy and out of sync. It makes me wonder how good their AI would be if web pages are this much trouble.
Snark aside though, I do hope this is not an april fools joke, and that it's a real attempt at AI. I know it would really just be a complex traditional program, but I'm still curious what a modern try at AI would look like. I know it's coming back into development as of late, and I do very much look forward to the development of real AI.
If anyone wants to comment to inform me that real AI will never happen, I assure you I am already aware of that view. I see no basis for the argument that human intelligence is somehow special in this world. For medical science alone we will never stop researching the human mind, and I hope soon we find a way to recreate intelligence in software. It would be a level of intelligence above ours, I would think.
Given what Couple.me does, I expect the AI will just be other users of the appropriate orientation. Maybe slightly more poignant than the average April fool's joke.
This leads to unusual behavior if you do something as simple as tab away while one of them is playing for about 10 seconds. On both Chrome and Firefox, that will result in, when you tab back, complete gibberish as multiple timeouts that triggered while you were away both begin "typing" their text. I think the correct solution here is to have all callbacks drawing text depend on the previous one completing (since there's no overlaps, this should work well enough).
That entire sequence also felt very trite to me, but I can see how it could be appealing.