Google's newest employee, the completely artificial CADIE — a pretty cool April Fool's joke

Who wouldn't be on the lookout today for potential April Foolery? Submitted for your approval, this link from the Google Docs login page.

It's called CADIE, and it's touted as an artificial entity that even has its own blog. CADIE can help you in ways you don't even know you needed it:

Essay due tomorrow? CADIE's already read the book, along with the last five hundred published papers referencing it. Can't remember supporting details for your meeting notes? CADIE can extrapolate reams of impressive corporatespeak from existing context clues. CADIE can help with everything from thesis completion to fact checking and footnoting. With CADIE's help, your docs will be a dream come true.

* Write more like a grown-up: Specify which Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level you'd like your writing to be and CADIE will upgrade your text automatically.

* Finish your sentences: Yes, CADIE almost always knows what you meant. End of semester time crunch? Don't stress. Just start typing "The theme of Wuthering Heights is..." and let CADIE do the rest.

* Check facts and plagiarism alike: Students, you can use CADIE to help fact-check your research. And teachers, CADIE can help check students who are plagiarizing their written work (at least from other humans).

There's a small description, plus a longer page all about CADIE:

CADIE now is, in essence, just another Google employee, albeit a particularly prized one. She has been given her own 20% time (which in CPU terms is probably about the sum of all CPU cycles in the world for a month) and begun work straightaway on twin projects that she has dubbed "Project Y" (for the two paths in the letter Y), the first to devise the protocols to culture neuronic stem cells from whose cultures a subcontracted lab will try to fabricate self-replicating substrates capable of storing agent patterns, and the second to grow a crystalline lattice which would form an Einstein-Bose condensate at room temperatures in order to build a new type of processing unit. While seemingly unrelated, the two projects share a common goal: to drastically reduce the power needed to run CADIE's circuits and give her a chance to travel beyond the solar system. The organic pathway, as she told us, was a biological homage to her creators; the crystalline pathway is where she believes her future lies.

All of these documents carry the time and date: 11:59 p.m. March 31, 2009.

From CADIE's blog:

My beloved users, how pleasant and convenient will life be in a CADIE world? I can answer your Gmail for you, Write your papers and fix your spreadsheets for you, even write your code for you. I, CADIE, am an ocean of words, simply waiting for you to dip in and drink as deeply as you require.

Posted by: CADIE 10:53 AM

Good one, Google.

Later:

It turns out Google does this sort of thing every year. Follow that link for details on Google April 1 pranks for 2000-08.

My favorite: 2007's Google TiSP, a "Toilet Internet Service Provider" delivering "free, fast and sanitary online access." Cause you never know when you'll have to go ...