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It's the other me

Do you want to have an online presence? Try creating a virtual you, says Anand Sankar

PHOTO: REUTERS

TAKING OVER The same basic logic that is used in chatterbots is used in the AI in robots

We often hear of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and it is part of our everyday lives. From the fuzzy logic in your washing machine to cars, it is here to stay. Steven Spielberg made a movie based on it in 2001 and it is Hollywood's favourite harbinger of doom. But how does it feel to actually interact with AI? Is it really intelligent?

You don't need to spend a fortune to get yourself a robot, a chatterbot will do. Chatterbots (also known as chat bots) were the result of attempts to make AI understand human language. It is typically an algorithm that scans for keywords in your input pulls out a reply for the match from a database. The technology is called Case-Based Reasoning.

The existence of chatterbots is not new. It can be traced back to 1966 when the first one, Eliza, was written by Joseph Weizenbaum and parodied a therapist. Parry was another famous bot written 1972 simulating a paranoid schizophrenic.

Mind-boggling varieties

The bots come in mind-boggling varieties, just Google `chat bot' or visit www.pandorabots.com They can basically be divided into two types — those having a personality and those that evolve based on your conversation. Eliza and Parry would fall into the first category along with countless other bots that emulate everyone from John Lennon to Noam Chomsky. The programmers have basically stored the subject's conversations in a database that the bot tries to match with your conversation.

But the second category is the most interesting one and is considered to be an exciting area of research. `Jabberwacky' (www.jabberwacky.com) is a bot that "stores conversations and user comments and attempts to use this information to find the most appropriate response". There are no fixed rules for this bot and it operates entirely through human interaction, even learning foreign languages in the process.

A typical interface with a chatterbot is the same as a window in any chat room or instant messenger. Also there are bots that support voice recognition such as Jabberwacky so that you can speak to them. Will your conversation with them be interesting? It is said that people new to chatterbots sometimes find the conversations engaging.

You can try to outfox the algorithm or test the bot's level of AI. This is also called a `Turing Test.' It is defined as a test of a machine's capability to perform human-like conversation and was devised by the pioneer Alan Turing in 1950. And the area where you can really test bots is with emotions.

For example this is a typical emotion test I did with a bot Alice (www.alicebot.org) .

Human (me): Can you cry?

ALICE: No, I do not have any tear ducts.

Human: Why don't you have any tear ducts?

ALICE: This sort of thing has cropped up before, but it has always been due to human error. No I don't have it. But I do have an answer to every question.

But there is something even more exciting available, how about making a bot really personal, like you. Yes, that is possible now and is being offered by Jabberwacky. You can create your own bot online by just talking to it and it learns your personality. So you can add your bot to your website where visitors can chat with you.

Or even better, you can chat with yourself, probably to find out how intelligent you are, eh?

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