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Wormhole: The robotic alien that showcases Media.Monks’ AI platform
Media.Monks, a marketing agency that is part of S4 Capital, has created a robotic alien that can talk and think like an AI advisor. The alien, named Wormhole, is a way to showcase Media.Monks’ new AI platform, Monks.Flow, which can integrate various AI tools and data sources to create chatbots, automate processes, and use generative AI capabilities.
How Wormhole looks and sounds
Wormhole is a robot that resembles a worm-like alien from the movie “Men In Black”. It has a silicon skin that makes it look more organic than metallic. It is operated by animatronics that are hidden inside a wooden box that Wormhole sits on. It can bend its body, tilt its head, and sip coffee from a mug as it thinks and chats.
It has a distinctive personality and communication style. It has an edgy humor and a sassy attitude. It can answer questions and give advice, but not in a scripted way. It uses AI to generate its responses based on the context and the data it has access to.
“He has a specific communication style. Its answers are short [and] there are some personality traits…He knows how to answer things. It’s not scripted. It just gets an idea of how to answer things and based on that he’s able to [answer on its own],” said Iran Reyes, vp, global head of engineering at Media.Monks.
Wormhole’s dialogue is powered by OpenAI’s speech recognition model Whisper, and its voice is created by Amazon Polly, a text-to-speech platform. It can also switch between different large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, LLaMA 2, and Amazon Bedrock, depending on the situation and the use case.
How Wormhole works and what it can do
Wormhole is a physical manifestation of Media.Monks’ new AI platform, Monks.Flow, which debuted earlier this month during CES. Monks.Flow is a platform that can help integrate various AI tools and data sources to create chatbots, automate processes, and use generative AI capabilities in several ways.
Monks.Flow can create AI agents, such as Wormhole, that can work for brands and businesses. These agents can be sparring partners on creative sessions, or bots that can generate e-commerce solutions automatically. They can also be connected to various sources of information, such as Google, PDFs, or Google Drive, depending on the knowledge they need to access.
Monks.Flow can also control the personality and the behavior of the AI agents, and provide them with various prompts and additional data, depending on the situation. Moreover, Monks.Flow can use various guardrails to ensure that the AI agents are fetching information from the right sources and not saying anything inappropriate. This makes the AI agents safer and more customizable.
Rafael Fittipaldi, partner & global SVP of innovation at Media.Monks, stated that creating it was the primary objective. Agents also serve brands and can act as your creative companion during sessions. They can function as a bot that automatically generates e-commerce solutions and possesses extensive knowledge about the product, allowing people to inquire about it.
How Wormhole performed and impressed at CES
Wormhole was one of the attractions at CES 2024 in Las Vegas last week, where it demonstrated its AI capabilities and personality. Digiday interviewed Wormhole at CES, and found it to be witty and spot-on at times, but also generic and confused at other times. (Some of the flaws might have been due to the Wifi issues at the hotel suite where the demo took place.)
Wormhole took a few moments to ponder a reply to each question, and a screen next to it showed how it was searching the internet in real-time based on the question and related keywords. It then generated a response using AI and spoke it out loud, as well as displayed it as text on the screen.
When asked about the trends at CES, Wormhole said, “Brace for a barrage of buzzwords: metaverse, digital health, food tech, blockchain/web3, robotics and AI, self-driving vehicles, VR and AR, and don’t forget new shiny gadgets.” But when asked about journalist Marty Swant, it described him as, “Digiday darling and AI-chatting hot shot always burning the midnight oil in Brooklyn and asking the toughest questions. Quite the character.”