What I Want to Discover
The real project is not about creating a pretty picture. I want to explore how viable a virtual AI assistant can be on an actual website.
Could visitors speak with her naturally? Could she understand their questions and respond with a realistic voice? Could she explain my projects, discuss articles about technology and innovation, and help people find information throughout the website?
More importantly, could she do those things reliably?
I want to see whether she can:
- Answer questions using approved information from the website.
- Clearly distinguish facts from opinions and speculation.
- Provide useful sources and links.
- Admit when she does not know something.
- Explain complicated topics in an approachable way.
- Work through voice or typed conversation.
- Remain useful without becoming intrusive or annoying.
- Operate at a cost that makes sense for a personal website.
She may eventually have a role in The Improbable Project Archives as well. While the fictional version of me describes my supposedly critical involvement in history’s greatest projects, she could quietly review the evidence, raise an eyebrow, and offer an occasional diplomatic correction.
How Viable Is This Today?
The basic building blocks needed to create this already exist. Current systems can support real-time voice conversations and interruptions and can retrieve information from a controlled collection of source material.
That does not automatically make a virtual assistant accurate, helpful, affordable, or pleasant to use. Those are the questions I want to test.
There is a considerable difference between a technology demonstration that looks impressive for a few minutes and an assistant that people would genuinely want to use.
Can she provide something more valuable than ordinary website navigation? Will an animated face make the experience more engaging, or will it simply become a distraction? How well will everything work on a phone? What will happen when she is asked a question I never anticipated?
Those are the interesting parts of the experiment.
What Happens Next?
My next step is to compare the available approaches without committing to a platform too early.
I will look at:
- Voice and text capabilities
- Facial animation and lip synchronization
- Accuracy and control over source information
- Privacy and accessibility
- Mobile performance
- Implementation difficulty
- Usage limits and total cost
Once I understand those trade-offs, I can decide what kind of private prototype makes sense to build.
Why I Am Doing This
The central idea behind CraigMeyer.org is exploring how technology can help people. This project gives me an opportunity to test that idea in a practical and visible way.
I plan to document the process honestly: what works, what does not, what it costs, and where the technology still falls short.
The finished assistant may eventually become a guide, host, narrator, researcher, and conversational companion for the website. Or I may discover that some of those ideas are more practical than others.
Either way, I intend to find out just how capable a website-based virtual AI assistant can really be.
Open question
What Do You Think?
What features would make a virtual assistant genuinely useful to you? What concerns would you have about accuracy, privacy, accessibility, or usability? Where could you see this technology being used in a practical way?
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