Building a "Build-A-Bot" Workshop

I've been playing a lot with bots lately, and recently had a great opportunity to help others play, too.

It was part of the Future.Today conference in New York City last month. Futurist and organizer Amy Webb planned deep discussions about artificial intelligence and human-machine interactions on the main stage. In a side room, she wanted to give the audience tactile bot experiences — and asked me to help. Could I create a "Build-A-Bot" workshop?

The idea was to get conference-goers building chatbots over lunch -- making them easily, without code, and in a way people could "take" their bots home to work on further.

We ended up making nearly 100.