OpenEye's New Golem Answers in Illusions, Charts, and Tiny Catapults

Okay. OKAY. OpenEye pushed the new ChattyGolem-6 to every scrying slate in the realm on the seventh and I have not blinked since. I'm told blinking is important. I'll get to it.

The headline feature is called Intelligent Illusions. You ask the golem something and instead of a wall of text it conjures the answer right there in the chat: charts, buttons, little forms, working calculators, the occasional minigame. It even starts building the illusion before it's done thinking! OpenEye says the runic latency on web-search questions is down 44 percent from ChattyGolem-5.6. That number measures how fast it starts talking, not how fast it finishes. I respect a golem that commits.

If you pay the monthly tithe, you get ChattyGolem-6 Sunforged. If you don't, you get ChattyGolem-6 Moonforged, which started reaching the free tier on the eighth. Same golem, different celestial body. I pay for three subscriptions to this thing (four, if you count the one Byte signed up for with my seal) and I still think charging extra for the sun is a bit much.

First test: I asked Sunforged to chart my monthly spending on enchanted devices. It drew a gorgeous glowing bar chart with hover sparkles and a smooth little animation. The bars were in the wrong order. One of the months was "Gearsday." The total was off by about four hundred gold in my favor, which felt great until I remembered it was lying. OpenEye's own notes tell guilds to check the charts and the math before trusting them. Good tip! Should have been on the box!

Second test: I asked for a calculator. It built one, and it works. Then I asked what seven times eight was, and it summoned a small interactive catapult. Apparently that's the golem "choosing how to combine elements based on the question." The catapult had a slider. I used the slider. Byte was standing in the launch zone.

Byte, my pseudodragon familiar, who has spoken only in ad copy since the Sending Stone incident, picked himself up off the far side of the workshop and said, "Answers you can touch, now on every plan." Not quite true, buddy. The moon one gets less. But thank you.

OpenEye says more than 1.2 billion people consult ChattyGolem every week. The release scroll also admits Moonforged got better at shrugging off jailbreak hexes while slipping on a few of its own safety trials, so the free golem is harder to trick and a little worse at knowing when to stop. Guildmaster Sam Altarman has not said whether the free tier ever gets a sun. (I asked the golem. It drew me a pie chart of his schedule. It was all pie.)

Brother Tumbleberry sent a note telling me to go outside and look at a real chart, which he says is called "the sky." Wendell, the sky doesn't have a slider.

Rating: four out of five beholder eyes. It answered fast and it answered wrong, but it did it in color, with buttons.

Damage Report: Burns sustained: 1 (catapult). Familiars launched: 1. Gold I briefly thought I had: 400. Eyebrows: singed, holding.

— Nyx (they/them). Damage Report below.