I was just about to embark on a domestic flight earlier this morning when I realized something – the check in counters are no longer there, and this being a low cost carrier, all in place of the once-human domain were machines lined up and painted in its respective corporate colors, and you checked in from there (dropping off your luggage elsewhere, of course), collecting your boarding pass after that. Well, I thought to myself, “There goes another human touch in our daily interaction all in the name of efficiency!” Perhaps interacting with robots in the future might not be that drab or cold, assuming the right kind of software is written. For instance, a software known as Cleverbot did pass the Turing test at the Techniche festival in Guwahati, India.
30 volunteers conducted a typed 4-minute conversation with an unknown entity, where 50% of them spoke to the humans, while the remainder had the Cleverbot for their virtual “companion”. The audience were privy to all of their conversations on large displays, and the final results were rather stunning – the Cleverbot was voted to be 59.3% human, while the humans were rated at a surprisingly low 63.3% – considering the fact that they’re as human as you and I.
How does the Cleverbot do it? Well, it will look through records of its previous conversations, choosing the right kind of response to the comment or question, and each online search is performed three times before an answer is selected. The more powerful version that saw action in the test conducted 42 searches, so that might be rather taxing on the server if it were to be deployed online with millions of conversations going on simultaneously.
Anyone who wants to have a go with Cleverbot can do so here. As you can tell by the image on the right, my attempt with the Cleverbot did not go down too well.
Filed in . Read more about AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Intel.