Global - Technology - Review

Previous winner of the Loebner Prize hopes to beat the 30% threshold this time.

Artificial Solutions (www.artificial-solutions.com), the natural language interaction (NLI) specialist that enables users to have a meaningful, humanlike interaction with technology, announced today that Elbot will be taking part in the Turing100 contest held at Bletchley Park on the 23rd June 2012. A previous winner of the Loebner Prize Contest, Elbot is the creation of R&D Consultant, Fred Roberts and is powered by Artificial Solutions patented NLI technology.

Organized by the University of Reading's School of Systems Engineering on what would have been Alan Turing's 100th birthday, Elbot will have to face 150 Turing Tests carried out by 30 judges. First devised by the British mathematician as a marker to demonstrate intelligent behaviour, the Turing Test requires that a machine is able to fool a human into thinking it is another human during a text based conversation.
Elbot, once wittily described by the BBC as a cross between Dusty Bin and a Teletubby, is able to converse with users about any topic under the sun. But looks, as they say, can be deceptive - Elbot is the only contestant of the Loebner Prize, an annual competition based on the Turing Test, to be the closest to the 30% threshold by fooling 25% of his human interrogators and has been crowned 'King of AI'. Now over ten years old, Elbot has become a test-bed to continually explore the psychology of human-machine communication.

Artificial Solutions' NLI technology that powers Elbot uses powerful linguistic libraries and rules to enable humans to have a meaningful conversation with him using natural language. Moreover, with a rich personality module implemented, he has the "psychology" to convince people into thinking they are talking to a human and not only a machine.

"We're really hopeful that Elbot will outperform his previous appearance in a Turing Test," says Fred Roberts, R&D Consultant at Artificial Solutions. "Unlike our commercially implemented intelligent virtual assistants that always have to give the right answer, Elbot's knowledge is not under question, he only has to convince the judges he's a human. However that still means that he has to have a very broad understanding of many different subjects."

One of the latest additions to Elbot's capabilities is his ability to have a user teach him new names for colours. The idea behind project and how it was implemented can be read in Fred Robert's blog post on NLInews.com www.nlinews.com/2012/a-chatbot To chat with Elbot directly visit www.elbot.com  or like him on Facebook www.facebook.com/#!/elbot.the.robot