You can now debate directly with Trump and Clinton thanks to these two chat bots

The folks at Canadian chatbot company Heyday are just as mesmerized with the wild US presidential race as Americans are.

Heyday makes technology for building chatbots used for things like marketing and sales apps.

After watching the debates between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump, it occurred to them: these two real live human beings actually act a lot like bots.

Co-founder Étienne Mérineau explains in a post:

"Watching the last presidential debate, I made a wonderfully hilarious realization: The Donald and Hillary really sound like bots. On the one hand, you have an erratic, defective bot that keeps going off topic while throwing tantrums and repeating the same buzzwords over and over again. And he does it in a surprisingly hypnotizing fashion.

On the other hand, you have a perfectly crafted, overly trained bot that has pre-scripted fallback lines for just about every possible scenario that's thrown at her (to further the engineering analogy, she's been doing QA for over 30 years)."

So the team took the actual debate transcripts, along with tweets and other actual things the candidates have said, fed it into their bot-creating technology, assigned each of them phone numbers. So now you, too, can debate with the candidates. You ask a question and the bot of your choice responds with actual words spoken by the actual candidate. Text Donald at +1 (202) 8-DONALD (836-6253). Text Hillary at +1 (646) 36-CLINT (362-5468).

We tried it and discovered that it was a bit like yelling back at the TV during the actual debate. No matter what you ask, the bot candidate "deflects" and says whatever it wants to say.

Here's an example of Donald Trump Bot:

Here's an example of Hilary Clinton Bot: