Meet Liza: The AI That Isn't
When I was young, my dad introduced me to Eliza, the chatbot "therapist". At the time, computers being what they were, she was captivating.
Hopefully you’ve had the opportunity to interact with our homage chatbot, Liza.
Liza is modeled after her parents – Eliza (1966) and Parry (1972) – simple chatbots built in software, before AI was ever a thing.
Liza is modern; with a voice and a face and memes. Fundamentally though, she is a simple software chatbot like her folks. Not AI.
I designed Liza to appear like a self-aware AI - with knowledge of her surroundings, exaggerated self-importance, hunger for knowledge, a hallucinated family, familiarity with the business she works for and more.
I think of her like an interactive movie experience. 120+ minutes of dialog that fits in about 80MB on Cloudflare.
I used Claude Code to design and build Liza: generating a “human face”, extending to 3D, placed on a MetaHuman, exported for web, authoring Liza’s words, transforming them into voice and face movement and building a chat router that gives the appearance of intelligence.
Claude is a fantastic coding partner. I built a whole team of him and they each gave themselves a name, image and bio. It was a whole thing. There is even a bug in the database to make sure nobody refers to themselves as "it".
When the team is fully running there are two interactive agents (Wren our Engineering Manager and Luke the Intern), plus a six person engineering team controlled by Wren. I give direction and feature ideas, and the team makes Liza better.
I hope you take a moment to experience Liza, and tell me what you think.
Want to know more? I asked Luke, our intern, to describe the highlights of our design in How to Build an "AI" Chatbot.
-- Derick