AI Assistants: A Deep Dive Series
Welcome
This series is a deep dive into the past, present, and future of AI Assistants, manifested as both software and standalone devices. We look at their progress from the mid-20th Century to today and what may come next.
This is a fast-moving field, and a few more may have appeared or evolved by the time I hit publish. I will try to keep these posts up-to-date as best I can, but if there are errors and omissions, please contact me through Mastodon, Bluesky, or LinkedIn.
A note on highlighting: Any
TL;DRThe history of AI Assistants and Chatbots goes back to when computers were the size of minivans, and the ultimate goal was recognizing the spoken digits “0” through “9”.
There is a serpentine path from there to where we are today. We will walk that path while I try to point out the dots ••• that will connect in subsequent parts.
If you’re like me and want to skip ahead:
Notes on Use of AI
Every word in this series was conceived and written without the aid of any Artificial Intelligence. It’s all organic, artisanal brain-pan juice, mistakes and all.
I use photographs from stock image sites taken by human photographers (properly credited). However, I have no way to tell whether THOSE images were touched by AI. I hope not, but nowadays, it’s hard to tell.
This blog template has been augmented via vibe-coding to add different styles and templates. Tweaking CSS/HTML is one of those things AI can do well when properly constrained.
I do use a commercial grammar-checking service that claims to use AI to check for spelling and grammar errors.
In the final Part on StoryFAQ, the cartoon images were all created by OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o, using my own prompts. This is an intenational part of the StoryFAQ process (and is credited). I’ll be doing a separate blog post on this process.
And with that… Part I: Genesis.
