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Microsoft Research wants to make you funnier on the fly, and has created instant chat software that can do just that.

Built at the company's Redmond base in Washington, the premise behind the CAHOOTS software was to explore the space "where a computer and a human collaborate to be humorous". It aims to fill that vast hole in your social skills, and ensure you never come up dry on witty repartee over instant chat.


The software works like any other ordinary web-based chat system, but processes the language you are using to suggest potential opportunities for hilarity based on those words. It veers away from textual humour though, and is, for now, confined to images. Users are presented with choices, and can select the most appropriate one if it piques their funny bone.

The word-linked image choices were tested on 738 people using Amazon Mechanical Turk, with data from these results combined with interviews from people that regularly use images in instant messaging. CAHOOTS picks out key words used in chats to conduct an image search and generate a constant stream of options. So when a user typed "Why u late?", they were presented with image search results for the terms "funny why" and "funny late"; a canned response image with the words "I don’t know why!" across it, that can apparently be funny in all circumstances when questions are involved; and an automatically generated meme.

When CAHOOTS' functionality was tested alongside a bot that automatically inserts hilarious images (we're presuming, largely cat-related ones), and ordinary chat systems, the Microsoft Research AI came out trumps. "CAHOOTS chats were rated more fun, and participants felt more involved, closer to one another, and better able to express their sense of humour," the team behind it writes in a research paper. "CAHOOTS chats were also rated as more fun than ordinary chat."


. The solution, they decided, was to leave the talking to the human, and just inspire them with a hilarious image they can add comments to.

Microsoft Research envisions the tools being used as an add-on to current popular chat systems, or integrated into Facebook and Twitter. Miaomiao Wen from Carnegie Mellon University, who collaborated with Microsoft Research on the project, told the New Scientist she'd also like to see it integrated into email, but was concerned, "it's not always appropriate to suggest a funny picture for an email".

Email is also, as many entrepreneurs will tell you, a dying enterprise that every other startup is attempting to disrupt. Perhaps automated humour will add a few years to its waning lifespan.