There’s a Mac and mobile application, Poe, giving you an easy way to kick the tires on artificial intelligence. I’ve been playing with it for the last day, and I recommend it, particularly if you’ve never tried this kind of thing before.

The application is as simple as download, open, and start talking to it. It’ll give you a good idea about the state of conversational artificial intelligence. It is easy to make fun of this stuff; AI gets a lot wrong. But it’s constantly learning. Like it or not, this stuff is coming, and it’s time to wrap our heads around that.

While we are not at the point of robot overlords just yet, we are getting to the point of helpful robots.