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Chatbot: Can machines think?
JP/ScreenshotA chatbot is an artificial intelligence program designed to make you feel like you are chatting with a human
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JP/Screenshot
A chatbot is an artificial intelligence program designed to make you feel like you are chatting with a human.
Some chatbots can be programmed with specific knowledge and can be taught to learn from people. Several websites provide chatbots.
How good these chatbots ' or any machine intelligence ' are can be judged by their ability to pass the Turing Test, which means that a person cannot tell if they are talking to a human or a program.
The test is named after the brilliant English mathematician Alan Turing, who helped to develop the first computer while working for the British government deciphering coded German messages during the World War II.
Before his tragic suicide in 1957, Turing wrote a famous paper titled Computing Machinery and Intelligence and asked the question 'Can machines think?' His answer was if they can, how could we tell the machines from the people.
Inspired by the work of the genius, the organizers of the Loebner Prize hold an annual competition for the most human-like computer. Here are reviews of the four finalists for 2013.
Mitsuku
mitsuku.com
Mitsuku is an English-speaking chatbot launched in 2006. She can chat, tell stories, jokes and even tell you your horoscope. It is programmed to learn from its chat friends and can talk about the weather, music and sports.
She can also show you pictures of people that you're talking about and relevant webpages. She also remembers you the next time you visit if you are using the same computer. How clever.
Tutor
rong-chang.com/tutor_mike.htm
This chatbot is an English-language tutor for students. Tutor was developed by Ron C. Lee in July 2008. Tutor can help you with grammar and give advice on how to improve your English. He can also spot grammatical errors and different spellings in American and British English.
He also knows some words in Spanish, French, German, Chinese and Japanese. Moreover, tutor also has knowledge of culture, government, history and geography.
Rose
brilligunderstanding.com/rosedemo.html
Rose was developed in October 2011 by Bruce Wilcox and she is a computer hacker chatbot. She is available through a text interface and likes to talk about computer security very much.
Izar
appsentience.com/btchat
This one is an alien chatbot created by Brian Rigsby. Izar is available online and as a mobile app as well. You can talk about anything with Izar and in return, he will answer you with some facts.
Izar is also programmed to learn more when people talk to him. As a mobile app, you are not just able to talk with Izar but also interact with him, such as pinch him, poke him, fling him and more.
Mitsuku, Tutor and Izar use the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) to communicate with people, while Rose uses ChatScript.
AIML is an Extensible Markup Language (XML) used to create natural language software agents. AIML is tag-based language and enables human to input knowledge into chatbots.
AIML defines a data object class called AIML objects, in other words, the AIML objects are the language tags and each tag (mark: <tag></tag>) corresponds to a command.
The most important AIML elements are categories, patterns and templates. Categories are the fundamental unit of knowledge.
A category consists of at least one pattern, which is a string that matches with one or more of the user's inputs, and one template, which specifies the response to a matched pattern.
However, AIML is hard to maintain, unlike ChatScript.
ChatScript is an open source engine created by Bruce Wilcox. ChatScript aims to pattern-match on general meaning, instead of AIML just a simple word pattern-matcher. ChatScript focuses on detecting similarities, and therefore, is more concerned with sets of words and accepted representations.
It uses a simple visual syntax and matches concepts instead of single words and able to specify words which are not included in the input, in which allows you to estimate patterns of meaning.
ChatScript also subdivides rules into topics and accessible via keywords.
It makes an efficient search of a large collection of rules, thus making it easier to maintain.
So are you interested in building your own chatbot? You might need to learn one of these chatbot languages.
