This new chatbot wants you to be able to talk directly with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump

by Sam Dewey
August 9, 2016

The 2016 presidential election season has fueled a bona fide firestorm for many an online publication, who are reacting to (and, at times, encouraging) a brouhaha of clickbait-y, racist Tweet roundups on the one hand and inflammatory tales of email scandals on the other.

With libraries of interviews, debates, Tweets and ads published daily, it’s hard to cut through the political noise to find answers to the questions you care about most.

But a new project by SocialKaty founder Andy Angelos wants to do just that.

FutureStates is a chatbot designed to let users pose basic policy questions — think, “Do you support the legalization of marijuana?” or “How will you reduce the number of people in U.S. prisons?” — to the four major candidates running for the Oval Office this election cycle (Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein). It responds to a user’s queries by mining a database of responses a candidate has publicly stated in interviews, speeches, debates and on social media.

“We put that info into a database and grow it, and then parse that information into smaller chunks that are categorized by what the candidate is actually trying to communicate,” Angelos said.

While the actual truth of a Hillary- or Donald-bot response isn’t vetted by FutureStates, the idea is to present the user with a given stance and let her or him make a call on its validity — cutting out the potential biases of a writer like yours truly.  

“It’s a time saver, but it also cuts through some of the cognitive load of having to determine what point of view the person who’s writing something is coming from,” Angelos said (pictured left).

The bots are accessible on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram and on FutureState’s website itself. Before users can ask their questions, the bot asks a few qualifying questions — maybe around how you feel about a certain scandal or the largest concerns you have for the incoming president. After that brief political litmus test, users are free to ask away (with the caveat that questions need be fairly straightforward, as the bot can’t handle content with too much context or nuance).

As you continue to ask questions, a Donald-bot, for instance, will begin to recognize questions and interrupt with links to actual multimedia clips that coincide with your question — giving you a more comprehensive view of where a candidate stands, from their own mouths.

Angelos said he came up with the idea in February after spending some time working with campaigns to make sure their advertising best practices and marketing tech stacks were up to snuff. By June, he brought on friend and Techstars alumnus Sean Corbett to help build the foundation of the bot, which needed to be able to navigate large, flat data sets with thousands of points with different categorizations that had to adapt over time based on user input.

Having founded SocialKaty with Katy Lynch in 2010 (which would go on to exit in 2014), Angelos is no stranger to the entrepreneurial scene in Chicago. Prior to his involvement with SocialKaty, Angelos also started a company called Social Dev Camp that aimed to put on tech events for the city’s incipient tech community.

As it stands, Angelos has no concrete plans for the experiment post-election. Exploring the chatbot space is enough, he said, knowing that he’ll be better equipped to apply that knowledge to his next venture.

“That’s a win for me,” he said.

Headshot and video via FutureStates. Image via Shutterstock. 

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