Mitsuku Chatbot Wins Loebner Prize 2013

mikejuk writes "The final round of the 23rd annual Loebner Prize competition took place in Londonderry, Northern Ireland with four chatbots hoping to convince four judges that they were humans. Mitsuku, a chatbot that is kept busy chatting to people around the world, was awarded this year's bronze medal. Mitsuku's botmaster, Steve Worswick, used to run a music website. Once he added a chatbot he discovered more people visited to chat than for music so he concentrated all his efforts on the bot but he still regards it as a hobby. Mitsuku uses AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) and is a pandorabot, based on the free open-source-based community webservice the enables anyone who wants to, to develop and publish chatbots on the web."

Add a voice synthesizer

[Anonymous Coward]

... and get a device that could be programmed to deal with telemarketers.

It might be amusing to see just how long one could string telemarketers along before they discover they are talking to a machine.

Along the lines of the TeleCrapper 2000, but this one might keep one on the line for quite some time with some amusing results.

A coy female voice.

Telemarketers.

I can't stop 'em, but I might get some fun out of 'em.

First question I asked it muffed

[John Jorsett]

I asked it, "What color is your dog?" and it responded, "That would depend, as a dog can be many colours." Looks like the Turing Test passage is a ways off.

Re:Just on a point of protocol

[Anonymous Coward]

Calling it 'Derry' instead of 'Londonderry' would irritate just as many. "London/Derry" to keep the RMS acolytes happy?

Re:questions

[Earthquake Retrofit]

As I may have mentioned in years past, I don't think judging AI or chatbots by how "human" they are is very useful.
For instance, one of the questions mentioned in the article was "Why am I tired after a long sleep?" A bot that wasn't trying to pretend to be a human could say "I have no need for sleep, but maybe your cache expired." Or make a crack about 'puny humans.'
I studied some of the software that prize winners have shared and found it very interesting, but the questions people actually ask are more valuable to me as a botmaker. If the humans looked beyond this artificial limit, while designing (and using) this technology, very interesting interactions can take place. I'd like to see Loebner redefine the parameters. perhaps categories.
Best performance as a taxi driver.
Best bot for making you think.
Best for getting answers to homework questions.
Bot most likely to take over the world.

There's already plenty of humans.

Re:Add a voice synthesizer

[SpzToid]

You mean Lenny?

http://nerdvittles.com/?p=6762 [nerdvittles.com]