Okay, we all know Miss Piggy is a puppet. But isn’t it fun to frequently play along with the conceit that she’s “real?” That she’s a living, breathing performer who can appear on talk shows, and receive awards, and have celebrity feuds?
Yes, all those things are fun, and now another thing that’s fun is to chat with Miss Piggy on Facebook. For an unspecified span of time, Mondays through Fridays from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM Pacific Standard Time, you can have a real-time conversation with America’s most famous pig by messaging her on her official Facebook page. You type something to Piggy, she types back, and most of the time, her responses are actually relevant to what you’re saying.
It’s pretty convincing. According to this interesting article on Marketing Land, Facebook-Piggy isthe work of an Israeli company called Imperson, which has been working on this technology for other fictional characters as well:
About 6000 responses were created for Miss Piggy, according to cofounder and CTO Eyal Pfeifel. The 2014-founded company has participated in the Disney Accelerator program in Los Angeles, and the studio — which helped write and then vetted all the in-character remarks — is also an investor in the company.
The chat-bot engine parses each incoming remark, and determines the most appropriate pre-written response to send. Some variable information is particular to the conversation, such as the name of the conversational partner. Once a message is sent from a fan, the character becomes a Facebook contact, and the fan can re-enter the conversation through either the page or the Facebook Messenger app.
Give it a try. If you’re brave enough, you can even ask her about Denise. Fortunately, the technology is not yet advanced enough to allow users to karate-chop each other over Facebook.
Click here to talk to the chat-bot engines on the Tough Pigs forum!
by Ryan Roe – Ryan@ToughPigs.com
