I have not queried Jeeves in ages and I imagined that it went away eons ago!! Alas, Jeeves onle RECENTLY shut down!!
Jeeves was the original ask a question, get an answer" platform. Jeeves was the insiation for an automotive repaid question and answer site I formed eons ago..."Ask Randy". Randy was a human that listened to a car and diagnosed the issue over the phone. Worked really well!! The car whisperer I suppose.
Jeeves was 28 this year and it has now morphed into Bing. In a way, Jeeves started the whole search for an answer era tha t we enjoy today. We owe a debt of gratitude to Jeeves.
Tisummarize Jeeves....it was 30 years ahead of its time. The technology was not reasy for Jeeves. This is an unfortunate exampleof being corret, but still getting swept aside. I do not know how Jeeves hung around for 28 years. He was futuristic in 1995 when it all started.
Google came around and "ask a question" resulted in a cadre of blue links that may or may not have been relevant. Blue links are not really an answer. Jeeves had answers even if you did not want to hear them.
Jeeves had a lot to offer but he didn't have what we have today. He did not have:
5 Things Jeeves Didn't Have
A conversational interface needs five things to work.
Compute. Memory. Inference. Distribution. Data.
Jeeves had one of them. Distribution.
He had the AOL portal, the butler in the bowler hat, and a Super Bowl ad budget. That was the company.
The other four didn't exist in any form he could use.
Compute was a server farm running Pentium IIs. Memory meant a session cookie that died when you closed the browser. Inference was a pattern matcher pretending to understand English. Data was whatever pages had been indexed that week.
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