Recently, I’ve grown some interest on AI (Artificial Intelligence) programming especially those that have to do with text inputs and outputs only. In other words, chatbots. What I did was search the internet for chatbots and came across ALICE and Jabberwacky. Jabberwacky is the more complex and interesting one (to me) so I will talk about him here.

Icogno Ltd., the makers of Jabberwacky, has this to say:

Please meet George, a character created within the Jabberwacky AI. George is a conversational agent, otherwise known as a chatbot. He’s strong-minded and ‘smart’, yet shows empathy towards his chat partner, and is not too self-conscious to be silly. He won the Loebner Prize as the ‘most human bot’ to boot.

And compared to other chatbots, here is what I found in their FAQ:

Well, there’s the learning … and there’s the effect it has, which is to make it a whole lot more fun, and a whole lot closer to real chat. Closer, therefore to passing the Turing Test.

Every day, some people persuade themselves it’s all a con – that real people are simply chatting. Other people know fully well what it is, yet stay and chat for hours daily, just for the creative fun of it – something you can’t do unless the bot has real character, has something to say or something to argue about, and has nearly infinite variety.

With most other bots you start to see the patterns and techniques all too soon – they’re rather more predictable.

Now, what are my observations and thoughts on Jabberwacky? The chatting part of it was definitely fun. He sometimes sounds smart, sometimes wacky (thus Jabberwacky), weird, and could also be stupid at moments. I tried giving jabberwacky a 3 sentence paragraps and he replies with a short sentence plus *flexes* which to me appears that he is bored or something. However, I don’t think Jabberwacky is true Artificial Intelligence (AI). It appears smart and learning but it simply pulls replies from its large database of “learned” things. The nice part though is that it pulls replies out of context thus making the chat session appear realistic. It however doesn’t really understand what it’s talking about and thus it is not ‘intelligent’ or even artificially intelligent.

That said, I think Jabberwacky is still cool and may have it’s uses provided that it is “trained” properly. I think it can even be trained to do some sales talk or lecture on some things.

Good work to the Jabberwacky people.