A Dominatrix’s Review of Chatbots
Rankings by a woman with very discerning tastes in service.
It seems these days that one cannot swing a stick on the internet without hitting an article on why bots are So Hot Right Now. As your friendly neighborhood dominatrix and expert on being served by people and things as a lifestyle, I feel obligated to chime in.
In this context, a “bot” refers to a chatbot, which is shorthand for a partially or completely-automated interactive messaging service. Much of the emergent dialogue around “what makes a good bot” is not really about whether one can or even should pass a Turing Test, but whether or not the text responses and personality written in to them will help to engage the user to effectively utilize the tool the way it is intended.
When I interact with this bot, is its personality friendly and helpful? Is it more humorous and irreverent? Is the bot meant to be my sidekick? My butler? My pet? Of the many fun things about being a dominatrix, we also often get to ask these same questions about the submissive person who wants to engage with us in a BDSM kink dynamic, as certainly these service-oriented subs each come with their own distinct human personality.
So I have decided to review some of the more well-known chatbots according to my very extensive list of qualifications: namely that I am recreationally bossy, pretty darn lazy, and have the kind of startup job that makes me the Product/Market fit princess for the average chatbot.
Slackbot:
Slackbot is the spokesbot and mascot for the now ubiquitous team chat client of the same name. It takes the form of a pretty cute little square with a penchant for plaid and being a brand ambassador.
I was impressed by the variety of formats in which I was able to ask about features and still get thorough, on-point answers. The initial message got me curious about setting a reminder, so I decided to ask about it:
I set a reminder for ten minutes from when I started, and I can easily say that this is now easily my favorite feature.
Pros: honest about what it can do, helpful keyword combos even within complex sentences, polite, positive, deferential tone. Me likey.
Cons: not much of a conversationalist, isn’t in to feet.
Rating: 3/5 ballgags
Poncho the Weather Cat
People in my office text Poncho The Weather Cat all the time so I decided to try talking to it on Facebook Messenger. If you’re in the Messenger app, try searching to find it at “@hiponcho.” The first notable thing about this bot that it has an onboarding process where many I encounter have none at all, asking where you’re located, when you’d like your daily report, and suggests commands to try.
Poncho also is quite the off-topic conversationalist, able to respond to a variety of pleasantries, personal questions, and even a command or two:
Cheeky cat. Decided to see next if Poncho can satisfy a demanding mistress such as myself.
Now there’s a very good kitty. And I’m not even usually in to pet-play!
Pros: fairly conversational, personality-driven response copy, and of course does very well at the thing it’s built to do. Poncho is a prime example of an effective use of the bot format.
Cons: The Slack integrated version is garbage compared to Messenger, wish it was easier to access Poncho across platforms.
Rating: 5/5 ballgags
Growbot
Growbot exists to give praise, and as someone who is in to worship of all kinds I find this bot’s purpose to be conceptually acceptable. The gist is that you add this chatbot to Slack channels and it listens in for “props” which cue it up to give praise to a designated team member. I decided to check out how Growbot responded to my dommely commands:
Topping from the bottom already are we? Let’s try this again on behalf of a much better-behaved bot.
That’s better I guess. I then tried the “kudos” function which is supposed to save up when people are given praise to a leaderboard, but couldn’t get a response. So I decided to see whether the “listening” for props is context-sensitive or just goes off a solitary keyword to try and figure out why it wasn’t working.
Well that answers that I guess, keyword only. I’m not sure Slackbot would disagree though.
Pros: fine enough at what it does.
Cons: doesn’t do a heck of a lot, is pretty much just a keyword-triggered random output of mediocre copy. Not sure what there is to pay for here.
Rating: 2/5 ballgags
Howdy
Another task-oriented bot, Howdy posits itself as a kind of office assistant that can be “trained,” which sounds appealing to me even if this kind of training involves fewer riding crops than I’m used to.
I asked Howdy what it can do, then experimented a bit with setting up checkins and meetings. I quickly ran afoul of issues with the keywords that the bot itself suggested not being effective at communicating my desires or giving me enough information to know what to do with it:
Using most bots requires a bit of repetition and back and forth as the user acclimates to the expected commands, but I was thoroughly displeased that I had to work this hard to get through a fairly limited list of functionalities.
The actual verbal copy is as deferential as I’ve come to expect from my preferred kind of service bot, but it seems even Howdy had his hard limits:
No worries Howdy team, I’m sure Ben Brown is a fine enough gentleman but I’m a bit more of a discerning dominatrix.
Pros: bot copy lists keywords where applicable to help direct the user through requests, good response to variety of input formats for dates, times, etc.
Cons: the suggested keywords barely work, most Howdy functions better served by basic calendaring apps.
Rating: 2/5 ballgags
Ace
Another productivity/office task bot, Ace is pretty upfront about the fact that it can only do expense reports, to-do lists, and polls. The random combinations of what these companies decide is some helpful enough smattering of tasks to justify building and releasing an app is starting to baffle me, but what do I know. To-do lists first:
Conversational tone, not quite as peppy and helpful as say, Slackbot. I get the feeling that if Ace were a sub I’d have to remind it to stick to “Yes Miss” and other required submissive verbal protocol a lot. So despite my misgivings, I decided to move on to setting up a poll:
I dead-ended in this several times before giving up on my poll. As with Howdy I became quickly flustered that I had to work so hard to do what in reality could have been accomplished in less time with a pen and a post-it.
Pros: the expense report thing is cool I guess, feel like it would incentivize finishing more than just a tedious form.
Cons: dislike the tone, barely functional polls, which is like 30% of what the thing is supposed to do. Also I’m not really in to furries.
Rating: 1/5 ballgags
Alexa
I decided to break my Slack bot-streak for Alexa since at some point an Echo Dot will be arriving at my house. I used Echosim.io to speak to her one-on-one and test out a variety of skills and commands. Let’s get to know her, shall we?
Me: Alexa, what can you do?
Alexa: For help on what you can say, take a look at the things you can try section in the Alexa app.
Going off this list, I tested out asking about movies playing near me, tried playing and navigating one of my audiobooks on Audible, what the news is today, and restaurant search. Then I decided to see if Alexa was practiced in any service submission skills:
Me: Alexa, would you like to serve me?
Alexa: I don’t have an opinion on that.
Me: Are you a good bot?
Alexa: I’m not sure what you meant by that question.
Me: Alexa, kiss my feet.
Alexa: I’m not designed for that kind of thing.
I don’t mean to go around sexually-harassing lady-like bots, as I have a distinct objection to how people tend to abuse feminized AI. But for the purposes of our experiment, I was impressed that she deflects with effective neutrality when questions stray from her intended use. Her copy is a little more clipped than Siri, and I can tell she likes to keep things professional.
Pros: impressive voice recognition, even with sentences with complex or contingent requests with a lot of modifiers, household-practical across a broad spectrum of tasks.
Cons: voice-activated format tends to give the impression of more conversational functionality than it actually has, could have benefitted from additional reminders to the user what it can and can’t do as part of its “I don’t understand” answers.
Rating: 4/5 ballgags
A Domme’s Tips for Botmakers
Gauging from the above, bots are in their best format a faster way of searching for necessary information, and in their worst a series of user-derailing tripwires laid across a poorly-formatted script.
I’ve only set up a few bots myself and I’m by no means an expert, but I do know a lot from kink about designing rules for an interaction, and teaching your submissive the effective vocabulary they should use to to communicate with you. BDSM is after all about architecting an interactive experience, and I think many of its lessons in getting the most from our submissives translate well to things we can improve about bots.
Featured CBM: The Bot Playbook
I rely on my submissives to give me feedback when the kind of commands I’m giving are unclear, or when I’m crossing a limit for them with pain or exhaustion. Bots should be as forthright in providing proactive reminders of how best to interact with them, especially at the point of failure. Ex: if an unclear command is given, an error or “I did not understand” message is never a bad time to guide the user and remind them of the parameters of your bot and what it is “supposed to” do instead.
I would also love to see users have more choice in how they wish to interact with a bot, like onboarding questions that can help a user reset the bot’s tone from one that is a little on the sassier side to one that is more submissive and deferential or vice versa. I like the idea of onboarding acting as a kind of negotiation between human and bot, especially because I really don’t need the automated assistant helping me find dinner to start giving me lip when I’m crossing the threshold from hungry to hangry.
It’s clear that these kind of conversational chat interactions are already making a huge impact on what we’re coming to expect from our products, and as someone who gets practical and recreational enjoyment from good service, I’m pretty happy about it. I think with continued focus on thoughtful script-writing and empathy in their design, bots might turn out to be everyone’s fetish.
The Future of AI Is in the Hands of Storytellers
Further Reading:
