About me
Conversational Computing, since 2016
I am Giorgio Robino — an AI architect and a composer. I build systems that hold a conversation with people: chatbots, voice interfaces, agentic GenAI applications. And I write music. Since 2016 I have been writing about that work here, on ConvComp — and I am still at it, now on the other side of the machine.
What I do
By profession I am an AI architect. I design enterprise GenAI systems and take them to production: agentic workflows, RAG, multimodal, on-premise deployments for regulated sectors. Behind that, thirty-odd years of software engineering and project management.
How ConvComp began
The blog started on Medium: the oldest posts in this archive date from December 2015. But the collaborative blog — the one you are reading — was born from #convcomp2016, the first Italian chatbot day: 24 June 2016, at Venini42 in Milan, free and open to everyone. It was organised by me together with Giuditta Del Buono.
In 2018 the two of us wrote the page that is still in this archive, Chi siamo, signed with both our names and describing the blog as conceived and edited by us. That is also why the articles written by guests carry their author's name next to the date.
Then the publication went quiet. The site stayed still for a while, and in the meantime Medium retired custom domains for publications and changed several other things in ways I did not consider correct — starting with the fact that a publication with its own domain could stop being reachable at that domain. So I took the archive out of Medium and rebuilt it here, as this site: static HTML, generated by a single Python script, no CMS, no database, no JavaScript, no external dependency.
ConvComp.it is now my personal blog: I had remained the owner of the publication all along, and for years I had been the only one writing here.
For Giuditta
ConvComp existed because Giuditta Del Buono made it exist. We organised #convcomp2016 together; she was the operational half — the venue, the programme, the partners — and above all she carried the relationships with industry and academia that brought the speakers and the audience to Milan. Her background is in technology transfer and open innovation, so connecting a university department with a company was her craft, not an afterthought.
She is also my partner in life. Her name stood next to mine on that page in 2018, and it stands again here, because this archive is as much hers as mine: without her it would have been a smaller thing. This page is for her.
The other half: music
Not everything I make is made of words. Music lives on its own site, SOLYARIS MUSIC: five albums of ambient guitar and soundscapes, and the Yamaha DX7II patches I programmed between 1993 and 1996.
The two halves meet in REAPER, where a project of mine reads a score written as text and turns it into MIDI, with the rules of the machine applied before writing. It is the question of this blog in another notation.
What this site is
- All the posts, newest first, or by date in the archive.
- RSS, if you still read that way. I do.
- The original publication, still online: medium.com/convcomp2016.
- The site itself: GitHub Pages serves it from a public repository, solyarisoftware/solyarisoftware.github.io — that is the generated HTML you are reading, nothing else. The generator and the sources of the posts are in a private repo.
Where to find me
- linkedin.com/in/giorgiorobino — the professional record.
- x.com/solyarisoftware — updates, mostly about what is moving in the LLM world.
- github.com/solyarisoftware — code, including the bots of the early years.
- solyaris.altervista.org — the music.
- Email: giorgio.robino@gmail.com.
Credits
ConvComp was never a one-man blog. The original publication listed fifteen writers besides the two founders; the archive can still attribute ten of them, and their posts are here under their own name, next to the date:
The other names are on that original list, but their posts could not be recovered, or their byline was lost in the move — an error of the migration, not of authorship. If you wrote for ConvComp and your name is missing, write me at giorgio.robino@gmail.com and I will put it back. The source of that list is the publication's own About page of 2016, which is still readable in the Wayback Machine.