He has gifts: the ability to speak in 40 languages and with 2000 people at the same time.
There's just one quirk: he doesn't really exist.
Symptom of the times.
Posted on 09/26/2006 7:51:56 PM PDT by annie laurie
George, who is 39, single and light-hearted, is looking for friends on the Internet.
He has gifts: the ability to speak in 40 languages and with 2000 people at the same time.
There's just one quirk: he doesn't really exist.
George is a piece of software, arguably the best of the speaking "chatbots" or talking robots, and he's recently received the Loebner prize in Britain ...
...
George appears on the website www.jabberwacky.com and takes the form of a thin, bald man with yellow glasses who wears a white turtleneck sweater.
He can smile, laugh, sulk and bang his fist on his virtual table. He can turn on the charm and wax romantic. But he can also turn coarse at times.
It isn't as if George only learned good manners.
All that he knows, he has accumulated in some 10 million conversations online, and he has not forgotten a single word.
...
The first chatbot, albeit a basic version, was created in the 1980s, but there are now a growing number of them on the Internet with names ranging from Billy and Alice to Chomskybot and the John Lennon Artificial Intelligence Project, an attempt to recreate the personality of the late Beatle.
A selection can be found at http://www.botspot.com/pages/chatbots.html.
But George's inventors say he is the forerunner of a coming generation of talking robots which inventors and marketing experts hope will unlock vast commercial possibilities.
Icogno, Carpenter's company, is talking with marketing experts who say avatars will soon be able to suggest customers' purchases at supermarkets, using their previous purchases to determine tastes and interests.
Another possibility being considered in the medium term: call centres, where just one avatar could respond to telephone calls from millions of customers at the same time.
...
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.au ...
I bet he's a spammer too!
I wonder how many of these lurk on IRC?
George seems to be busy at the moment.
I went out and tried talking to this chatbot (via the keyboard interface) a few weeks ago, when I saw a similar story elsewhere. I was not completely impressed. "His" responses to my various statements did not make much sense. I finally gave up. Who knows?? Maybe I caught "him" on a bad day!!
If you think about this for a minute, and the way the story is presented, you will understand why Liberals think this is huge scientific progress.
The bot might actually be connecting pairs of random chatters, translating between languages as necessary.
Symptom of the times.
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