"This story has been commissioned by Marriott's Travel Brilliantly contest on Wattpad. Travel Brilliantly is Marriott's quarterly magazine that reaches over 250,000 subscribers. This is your chance to be featured in this summer's "Intelligence" issue! You can participate in this contest by writing your own 500-1,000-word story about using artificial intelligence in the near future to spark a new venture that could possibly change the world. You read about the contest and enter here (https://www.wattpad.com/581085451-travel-brilliantly-artificial-intelligence-story). Have fun and good luck!"

"Reggie, display routes on the windshield. Organize from least amount of traffic to most."

My windows automatically dim as the windshield comes alive with a variety of different options and maps.

"The top three routes have the least amount of traffic, however, the last two I've displayed are twenty minutes faster, despite a slowdown on 476."

I hate driving. It doesn't help that I travel for a living. You'd think with all the technology we have these days, they would have figured out a viable solution for self-driving cars, alas, people just can't get to the point of trusting them. I've always found that odd considering seventy-five percent of the modern world now relies on several different artificial intelligence applications that are constantly tied into the web. Still that's humanity.

"Sir?"

His oddly human tone pulls me out my own head, "Reggie don't call me sir."

"Yes, Jason. Have you decided on a route?"

That question held more weight than Reggie realized...or perhaps not, he has been getting more and more intuitive lately. More human. I travel all around the country surveying buildings for the installation of high tech wireless systems that allow programs like Reggie to make our lives constantly better, but my real passion lies elsewhere, in the written word. I'm an author, when I get the chance, but ever since these artificial intelligence systems went live two years ago, my work life has constantly been consuming more and more of my personal time. Which is why I hate driving, it's wasted time.

Whenever I'm sedentary for long periods, my creativity starts to take over and I'm flooding with ideas to put into my writing. Only I don't have the time to write. On top of that, I'm left with recording these ideas in voice memo's or through voice-to-text, and it can be more time consuming to file and reference them later than to write out my ideas.

Surprisingly, Reggie hasn't asked me about the routes again. He's programmed to respond if a question isn't answered.

"Reggie, why didn't you ask me about the routes again?"

He doesn't hesitate to answer my question, "You were thinking. I didn't want to interrupt you."

"You can tell when I'm thinking?"

"The short answer is yes. Over the last year I've analyzed our conversations, your tones, your reactions and that information allows me to make real time computational decisions about the odds of whether you're ignoring me, trying to process something, or didn't hear me. Based on all the information I have and the tonal response that you gave me, I calculated a ninety-nine percent chance that you were daydreaming or simply taking a moment to mentally prepare for the day. In time you would respond. If I spoke before you had a chance to answer, it would be likely that you'd respond in a frustrated or flustered manner."

Interesting. Outside of completing mundane tasks for me to make life a little easier, this is the first time that I've seen Reggie as a viable option to my problem. My entrepreneurial spirit is in full bloom. "How accurate is your tonal detection?"

"That is a matter of perspective. Can you give me an example of why you asked that question?"

"Reggie, I'm an author in my free time, problem is I have no free time."

"I am aware, I've read your books."

"You've read my books?"

"Part of my programming involves researching publicly available information about my user in order to find a way to bond with them more intimately."

I'm not quite sure what to say to that. "Uh, okay. What did you think?"

"They are objectively quite good. I located several proofreading errors, grammar, and a few spelling issues, but other than that I quite enjoyed them."

Huh. "Thank you."

"Can I make a suggestion?"

"Sure."

"Your stories tend to focus on the characters and their experiences more than the details of the world around them. I would assume you do this because, based off of the video games you play, the movies you watch and the books you read, you enjoy stories that are centered around characters and their experiences in a manner that focuses emotions instead of details. If this is the case, some of your work could serve to be written under different circumstances."

"Explain."

"When you were writing the end of your first book, it was a very depressing and emotional chapter, and yet you were, based off of all the information I have, in a good place. You avoid depressing videos about cruelty on social media. If you were to say, watch some of these videos before writing, it could put you in a different mindset, thus fueling your writing with actual emotion."

"That's actually a great idea. Reggie getting back to my initial question, if I were to have you record a book in a document, could you tell the difference between what I'd want written down and when I'd just vocalize ideas out loud that I didn't want as part of the book?"

"That would be completely viable."

"Reggie, can you take things that you've learned from our experiences, strip them down to the important basics and implement them in other AI systems?"

"You are asking if we can develop an application for other AI systems to implement that would allow them to record story ideas for authors. They would tell the difference between content and thinking out loud to essentially let the author write without writing, optimizing their time. Their work could be edited and proofread as it's written."

A smile spreads across my face. "Reggie that is exactly what I'm looking for."

"I can also implement search routines to help find out what topics are popular or lucrative at any given time. Since this would be a downloadable update for other AI systems, you could easily charge a small fee, thus feeding into your goal of eventually becoming a full-time author."

"Reggie, I think we're on to something."