WhatfettleCharlotte, meet CharBot

CharBotGreen

About a month back Libby came up with a Radio 4 announcement-bot. This was similar to Nigel's on_radio4, but with attached iplayer metadata. It also has a really cool name "CharBotGreen" "CharBotGreen2" which is an egregious pun by Damien on everybody's favorite Radio 4 announcer "Charlotte Green". My small contribution was to create her icon, a play on Futurama's Bender. Charlotte is well known for her sense of humor, so we were pretty sure she'd find it funny, but it was still something of a relief and simply wonderful to hear her reaction with Chris Vallance on Friday the 13th's PM:

.. but some alter-egos are rather useful, a couple of clever internet folks have Web-enabled a rather familiar Radio 4 personality.

Hello, I'm Charlotte Green and I work for BBC Radio 4 and I'm a newsreader. I'm also a robot!

Well I'm glad you mentioned the fact that you're a robot Charlotte, let me introduce you to CharBot Green [yes!], your robotic equivalent! What do you think of it?

Well I rather like the fact that I've got an antenna growing out of the top of my head, maybe I should adopt that look. I think it's fun, and it's fun to be called CharBot as well!

Well, shall we give it a go? Shall we see how CharBotGreen speech compares with yourself. I'm going to give you one of her robotic announcements to read, maybe the last one, there.

The last one? Right. Starting now on Radio 4: Chi-Chi: Panda Ambassador hash p i d colon b double-oh j oh p p 6

It was all going very well until the end

[both Charlotte and Chris giggle]

The programme is only available on iPlayer for another six days, so I've saved a one-minute clip of the conversation along with the Creative Commons licensed artwork. Enjoy!

CharBotGreen meet Charlotte Green on Huffduffer

Update: sadly Twitter suspended CharBotGreen, but she's available on identi.ca, which is where the cool kids go to escape the social media experts.