Google Wave Robots
Google Wave Robots
An interesting part of the Google Wave one and a half hour demo video was the various robots that were used throughout the demo.
Google Wave Translator Robot: Rosie
I think the most interesting one was the translator robot named Rosie. Rosie will translate up to 40 languages.
With concurrent live conversations, anyone can use their own native language while participating in the wave and as they write, Rosie will translate it into the language that you tell it you want to read.
So while you are writing in English, your colleague in France is reading your conversation in French. As he types his reply in French, you are reading it in English.
This has enormous potential for speeding up international business communications.
Robots and gadgets are both extensions that third party developers can write. The main difference is that a gadget is dropped into a wave and a robot is a participant and can perform any of the functions that any other participant can.
Where gadgets are written in XML, robots are written in Java or Python using the Google App Engine which can be found at this site: http://code.google.com/appengine/.
Some other robots that have already been created are Bloggy, a robot that will publish the contents of a wave to a blog and Twave which was created by the Google Wave team.
A very interesting but long demo of Twave can be seen at: http://wave.google.com/. If you want to keep up with Wave Twitter posts then start following twephanie or googlewave on Twitter.
Being a robot, Tweety is a participant in your wave. What Tweety does is show your real time tweets in Wave and integrates back with Twitter so you can post to Twitter from within Wave. The potential for this kind of integration means pretty much a one stop shop for all your Internet social networking.
Wave’s promise of simplifying communications overload starts to look very real when looking at just these two robots.
Here is a screen shot of Tweety participating in a Wave conversation:
