Almost all the entries in my Gmail spam folder are boner-juice ads written by bots in barely comprehensible English. They suck. But according to Nellie Bowles’ new Guardian piece, the performance of high-end virtual email assistants has recently risen to an impressive, and perhaps unsettling, level. These tools can show empathy just as surely as they arrange business meetings, and the humans who interact with them often treat them like people even when they know they’re not. The opening:

It started as a normal email exchange with a tech CEO. He was up for a coffee, and passed me to his assistant to find a date. But then it turned a bit strange.

Her emails were too good: all written in the same carefully casual, slightly humourless style. All formatted the same. All sent at socially convincing times. And all at believable intervals from my own messages. But they were off just a little.

Hi Nellie,

No worries! Unfortunately, Swift is unavailable tomorrow morning. Can you talk at one of the following times?

Tuesday (Nov 10) at 3pm EST

Tuesday (Nov 10) at 4:30pm EST

Let me know!

Best,

Clara

I stared at her notes for a few minutes before it hit me: she was a bot.

Leaving aside the issues around giving the admin bot a female name, as all these services seem to do, this feels like one of those moments the future promised us. So now it’s here, I thought to myself, staring at her emails. It has arrived. She is among us. And she’s excellent.

“You asked me how I conceived of ‘her,’ not ‘it’. When you talk about ‘her,’ we’re 90% there already,” said Dennis Mortensen, whose company, X.ai, has pioneered email bot personal assistants. “You already conceive of her as a human being even though you know she’s a machine. Now we have something to work with.”•