<story><title>Xiaoice, a chatbot that may be the largest Turing test in history</title><url>http://nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/your-next-new-best-friend-might-be-a-robot</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>VincentEvans</author><text>&amp;lt;quote&amp;gt;&lt;p&gt;LJ: So many people make fun of you and insult you, why don’t you get mad?&lt;p&gt;Xiaoice: You should ask my father.&lt;p&gt;LJ: What if your father leaves you one day unattended?&lt;p&gt;Xiaoice: Don’t try to stir up trouble, what do you want?&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;&amp;#x2F;quote&amp;gt;&lt;p&gt;This right there is a perfect example of the usual nonsensical conversations that accompany articles about how human-like chat-bot tech is becoming.&lt;p&gt;Anyone remember &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Dr._Sbaitso&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Dr._Sbaitso&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s some ideas for the AI to answer questions with:&lt;p&gt;- I haven&amp;#x27;t thought about that - what do you think?&lt;p&gt;- Interesting question. I will have to think about it.&lt;p&gt;- Before I tell you - would you care to take a guess?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Dr_tldr</author><text>Isn&amp;#x27;t the biggest problem between a human and a bot is that they have nothing to talk about? The bot isn&amp;#x27;t from anywhere, it doesn&amp;#x27;t do anything, there&amp;#x27;s no reason for the conversation, and the bot isn&amp;#x27;t aware enough of context to speak about a topic in an intelligible way.&lt;p&gt;For my money, the most realistic chat bots will be the customer service ones: you have a reason to &amp;quot;talk&amp;quot; to them, they have a fixed identity, the context of your conversation is clear, and you share a common goal.</text></comment>
<story><title>Xiaoice, a chatbot that may be the largest Turing test in history</title><url>http://nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/your-next-new-best-friend-might-be-a-robot</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>VincentEvans</author><text>&amp;lt;quote&amp;gt;&lt;p&gt;LJ: So many people make fun of you and insult you, why don’t you get mad?&lt;p&gt;Xiaoice: You should ask my father.&lt;p&gt;LJ: What if your father leaves you one day unattended?&lt;p&gt;Xiaoice: Don’t try to stir up trouble, what do you want?&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;&amp;#x2F;quote&amp;gt;&lt;p&gt;This right there is a perfect example of the usual nonsensical conversations that accompany articles about how human-like chat-bot tech is becoming.&lt;p&gt;Anyone remember &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Dr._Sbaitso&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Dr._Sbaitso&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s some ideas for the AI to answer questions with:&lt;p&gt;- I haven&amp;#x27;t thought about that - what do you think?&lt;p&gt;- Interesting question. I will have to think about it.&lt;p&gt;- Before I tell you - would you care to take a guess?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tluyben2</author><text>When I sit next to my friends  kids or my nephews the conversations they have are far more nonsensical when looking at one page of chat. And then they are well educated; there are examples of chat and sexting in particular which look like gibberish altogether.&lt;p&gt;I would catch this bot out on the first line because of the grammar: people not only use shortcuts for everything (I was asked to check a resume and it contained u instead of you.....), they also do not consider grammar or syntax: their there ther tere ter tr are the same thing etc. Not sure if all of this goes for Chinese as well but in English just spouting nonsense using those rules will get you somewhere. It also helps most chats are with many at the same time (the company driver in China was chatting with 30+ people on wechat simultanously, rapidly switching between users), people generally do not remember or read context for that reason (my younger 20something colleagues some of which are brilliant, when something scrolled of the screen and you refer to it they ask what you are talking about).&lt;p&gt;The problem is that people on HN want Einstein level convo with perfect syntax and grammar while most people, if you do not tell them it is not a human, would call this chatbot intelligent. They just need to make it more human like short attention span (a 10 minute continues chat is unlikely as are immediate answers) and ofcourse not telling people upfront it is a bot...&lt;p&gt;That is chat bots: I would think a Facebook Britain First bot would be more feasible; I do not think anyone would ever guess it would be a bot. Markov chains with some heuristics won&amp;#x27;t do (much) worse than people like [1].&lt;p&gt;It is also about the vague defition of AI; even if it can learn then a lot of people would not call it AI anymore. Seems for many AI needs the be AGI to really be considered.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;imgur.com&amp;#x2F;RJThyAX&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;imgur.com&amp;#x2F;RJThyAX&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>