Yesterday we had an innovation day at work. During these days we have groups of people working on interesting new things trying to come up with new things we could start doing at work.
This time I was running a workshop around machine learning and chatbots. Our goal was to get familiar with basic machine learning tools and train a model that could be used to create a chatbot that could participate in casual conversations in our company chatrooms.
I started with a crash course going through the principles and showing some of my work I did last year to create my own bot. After that we kicked of creating a similar bot for each participant. This was already fun and the people kept up really well while I was dashing through the material. We were already spending quite a bit of time just spamming our test channel reading through the dialogue our bots started to create there and laughing at the results.
But the real fun began after everyone started experimenting with their own bots creating their own subject matter bots around the topics they were interests. Soon we had a bot spitting out lyrics feeder through text to speech synthesis synced to the beat of music playing in the background. A bot creating new literature marvels and so on.
I can't remember the time I've had so much fun at the work. And I have to admit, our company can be quite a fun place to work from time to time. I'm sure the whole office heard our laughter.