Meet the computerised stand-up

Gig-A-Tron 5000 has a voice recognition system and artificial intelligence, which allows it to select the best jokes and heckle put-downs from its repertoire.

At the moment, the gags have all been written by ‘her’ creator, comic Owen Niblock, but the ultimate aim is that she will be able to create her own jokes and react intelligently to the audience and performer.

Academic Kim Binsted has previously created a ‘Joke Analysis and Production Engine’ [JAPE], which produces childish gags based on puns – and the technology behind that could be combined with Niblock’s creation.

He is hoping to take Gig-A-Tron 5000 to the Edinburgh Fringe this autumn for a full-length show – but in these early days she knows only about a dozen gags and a handful more insults.

At only her fourth gig last night, above a Central London pub, the Gig-A-Tron 5000 was still experiencing some rookie nerves, occasionally failing to respond to commands to ‘tell a joke’ or ‘generate putdown’. And sometimes she would interrupt Niblock unprompted.

But when she did hit her stride, her gags – based on the premise of ‘write what you know’ – revolve around computer jargon wordplay, but the gimmick was enough to get a laugh.

‘For the first three gigs I battled against the computer head-to-head in a gag-off, with the winner decided by the audience,’ says Niblock, pictured. ‘But she kept winning and I have a massive ego, so we stopped that.’

The stand-up, who has a degree in computer science from Warwick University, explained that the Gig-A-Tron 5000 analyses how well each gag is received, so that at future gigs she will start with her strongest material.

‘It took about a solid week to program,’ he said. ‘Then a couple of days to train it to recognise my voice, and the same again to test it. But now it takes just a couple of minutes to add a new joke.’

But, it seems, the hardest thing to learn is that comedy basic, timing. ‘Getting the pauses just right it tricky,’ says Niblock. ‘The standard full stop pause is always either too long so there’s silence, or too short so she talks over the audience laughter.

‘The ultimate goal is to create an autonomous stand-up program which reacts to the audience and performer itself - but that's many, many years off at the moment. And I hope in future to have it generate its own jokes.

‘The alpha version reacts to my performance and tells its own jokes as well as dealing with hecklers.

Niblock will be giving the program - which runs on a laptop with an animated mouth - its first thorough demonstration at the Leicester Comedy Festival next month, before creating a full-length show for the Edinburgh Fringe in August.

Published: 23 Jan 2007