Apr. 2, 2003 | Bored? Lonely? Confused? Maybe just curious?
Take
heart. Lend an ear. Help is at hand.
From
quack psychiatrists, to modern capitalists, a 19th century serial killer, even an Oracle with a tri-cameral mind,
the Net is abuzz with chatterbots.
Swept
up by the heady-- or is it headless-- excitement of the 2003 Chatterbox Challenge which opened its virtual doors for public judging on April Fools Day, I’ve
been roaming the cyberstreets and gabbing with any faux-human that can spit text at my Web browser.
Hey
buddy can you spare a CPU cycle? Pitheewy.
After
pouring over the guest list of the Chatterbox Challenge and sampling the Simon Laven Page, Chatbot Friends-Links, The Personality Forge, AgentLand, and the BotSpot Chatterbot Page, hungry for some spicy repartee I visited nondescript storefronts, glitzy corporate
lobbies, eerie antechambers, and spoke with some colorful, if mostly flaky, characters.
Not
as colorful as the humans who program them or otherwise participate in events like the Loebner Prize Contest (Artificial Stupidity), chatterbots still have a way to go before they emerge from the 21st
century slime and evolve to a state of posthuman being.
A.k.a.
bots, chatbots, virbots, digital assistants, with trademarked monikers like [V]HOSTs, vReps, Conversive Agents, Lingubots,
Smart Characters, and Microsoft Agents, they come from various walks of artificial life. Built on disparate, often minimalist,
skeletons, some seem to presage the birth of real artificial intelligence. Whether or not the approaches and technologies used in the current litter
of chatterbots will be assimilated by true intelligences remains to be seen. In the interim, these bots provide useful human
factors and marketing intelligence-- and are helping push AI into the mainstream.
Many
chatterbot personas include creative animations, speech synthesis, and other evocative features. I was mostly interested in
the Turing test aspect of these bots however—that is “the dialog stupid”.
The added features and other bells and whistles like corporeality, the ability to engage in spoken conversation, and sentience
will be nice to have, but transcend the chatterbot definition.
The
bots I chatted with are classified here as Shrinks, Fem Fatales, Capitalists, Quirks, Best of Breed, and Real AIs.
The
following transcripts are actual dialogs with actual chatterbots. I admit to a few minor edits to clean up some errant prose
on my part. Otherwise, the text is faithful to the original and should be representative of what you experience when you seek
your own virtual titillation, friendship, and/or therapy.
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