By Marty Swant • January 22, 2024 • 7 min read •
Aliens and robots are both synonymous with sci-fi, but one marketing agency decided to design something more extraterrestrial to manifest its AI.
To show off its new AI platform, S4 Capital’s Media.Monks created an “Alien AI advisor” called Wormhole. With an aesthetic and personality inspired by the worm-like Annelids from “Men In Black,” Wormhole is covered with silicon skin rather than anything metallic or plastic like many other robots. Operated by animatronics hidden inside a wooden box Wormhole sits atop, the alien bot can bend its body, tilt its head and sip coffee from a diner mug as it thinks and chats.
Wormhole is a physical manifestation to showcase Media.Monks’ new AI platform called Monks.Flow, which debuted earlier this month during CES.
Created with the help of a Media.Monks copywriter, Wormhole is essentially an AI advisor as expressed by a sassy alien and created using a number of AI platforms.
Dialogue is powered OpenAI’s speech recognition model Whisper, and the voice was created with Amazon Polly, a text-to-speech platform. And rather than relying only on ChatGPT, Media.Monks created an internal tool for switching between various LLMs.
Media.Monks is also able to change the personality and provide various prompts and additional data, depending on the situation. The bots made with Monks.Flow can also be connected to various sources of information.
Wormhole isn’t meant to just exist in the real world; its digital siblings can also be used as AI agents for other tasks. And since it’s not directly connecting Wormhole or other bots to an LLM, Media.Monks can use various guardrails to make sure it’s fetching information from the right sources or saying anything that’s inappropriate. That control makes the bots safer – at least in theory — and also more customizable.
“That was the main goal when we created it,” said Rafael Fittipaldi,