Botnik Studios
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Botnik Studios is an entertainment group developed to exhibit work created by the Botnik community, a writer's society of artists and developers who incorporate technology in the creation of comedy.[2] This content is published on the Botnik homepage.[3]
 | |
Type of site | Entertainment website |
|---|---|
| URL | www |
| Launched | 2016[1] |
Features
Botnik's main tool is a predictive text keyboard, similar to one used by a smartphone. It offers options of words to type based on what has been previously entered, meaning that if the tool has analyzed a body of text it will find combinations of words likely to be used by a particular author[4] whose text has been 'scraped' by the system.[5]
The result generally sounds almost authentic in that it is recognizable but ridiculous enough to be considered funny by readers.[6]
History
The program was developed by Jamie Brew, a former ClickHole and The Onion writer, and Bob Mankoff, who is humor editor at Esquire and former cartoon editor of The New Yorker.[7][8][9] In August 2017 they were joined by computational scientist Elle O'Brien[10] and creative developer Joseph Parker.[11] Brew and O'Brien are based in Seattle and Mankoff and Parker work in New York.[12]
In 2017 Botnik began referring to themselves as an open community,[13] meaning Botnik users can download the predictive keypad, experiment with the tool and display their outcomes on the community page of the Botnik website.[14] In July of that year they received a grant from the Amazon/Techstars Accelerator Program thanks to being a startup whose technology could realistically improve Amazon's smart speaker assistant, Alexa.[15]
Botnik became better known when Zach Braff, the actor who plays J.D. on the medical comedy series Scrubs, shared a recording of himself reading a Scrubs-style monologue written by the Botnik system in December 2017.[16]
Botnik's Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash was ranked number four in the list of ten best internet moments in 2017 by The Guardian.[17]
