On Tuesday, October 24, 2017, Sam Kirkiles ’18 presented his Guild presentation to a full crowd of excited Kent students, including many computer science students, who, advised by Mr. Saxton, came to support Sam’s efforts in the field.

Kirkiles started his presentation by showing an Amazon Echo commercial. He then went on to talk about current uses of Graphical User Interfaces(GUI) and the different types of electronic helpers, voice- and text-based (Siri and Echo are examples of voice based assistants, while booking flights online is a text-based assistant).

One of the many reasons we don’t see these types of robots, he explains, is that natural language processing is very hard. Apps have also become less popular, with 13% of smartphone users downloading less than 50% of apps made. Kirkiles started this project to make his own app with text automation, Teller, to better understand how to revive the app market.

Teller, a text-automated financial assistant, was recently hosted on amazon web services. Using Teller is as easy as going to Facebook. You find the Teller account, and start to talk via typing to the bot. Teller links the user’s bank account to itself and analyzes the bank account so the user can plan their budget and expenses. Once logged out Teller deletes the facebook messages for security. Although Kirkiles does not plan to formally launch Teller itself, he explains that we will be seeing lots of apps like Teller.

Having started last winter, this project has been in the works for over nine months. When asked about the purpose of his guild paper, Kirkiles responded, “I was really interested in the topic and I was seeing all of the news, and I wanted a way to pursue it. I wanted to figure out if the hype was real and not something that will go away in a few years.”