An AI Chatbot That Looks Surprisingly Human (Passes The Turing Test)

Your Next New Best Friend Might Be a Robot

Meet Xiaoice. She’s empathic, caring, and always available—just not human.

Yongdong Wang | February 4, 2016

[...] She is an artificially intelligent software program designed to chat with people, called a chatbot. Since the reporter didn’t give us a heads-up about the interview, all of her replies were spontaneous, generated by her own intelligence and linguistic systems. Her “father?” That’s the Microsoft Application and Services Group East Asia, which is under my leadership.
Xiaoice can exchange views on any topic. If it’s something she doesn’t know much about, she will try to cover it up. If that doesn’t work, she might become embarrassed or even angry, just like a human would.
In fact, she is so human that millions of people are eager to talk to her. When Xiaoice was released for a public test on WeChat (a popular messaging and calling app in China) on May 29 of last year, she received 1.5 million chat group invitations in the first 72 hours. Many people said that they didn’t realize she isn’t a human until 10 minutes into their conversation.


Source: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/27/science/chatting-with-xiaoice.html?_r=0

<more at http://nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/your-next-new-best-friend-might-be-a-robot; related articles: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/27/science/chatting-with-xiaoice.html?_r=0 (Chatting With Xiaoice. July 31, 2015) and http://mashable.com/2016/02/05/microsoft-xiaoice-turing-test/#mU1J0YFe_kqf (Microsoft may be running the biggest Turing test in history. February 5, 2016)>