Dialogs with machines: Enterprise Conversational AI’s Turing Test
by Kishore Jethanandani
Conversational AI rose from the doldrums of chatbots as exasperated users soured over their nihil ad rem bloopers and cried for human assistance. In its emerging act, artificial intelligence is learning the art of dialog human enough for the enterprise to risk machines speaking on their behalf and completing tasks requested by customers and partners.
Conversational technologies are at an inflection point in the adoption curve setting the stage for a steep increase in demand. According to a survey of CIOs completed by Gartner in June 2018, four percent of enterprises have currently deployed conversational interfaces, seventeen percent are experimenting or planning to do so in the short-term, and twenty-one percent are planning to install them in the medium and long-term.
The human side to robots
Humanoid robots, sounding and looking uncannily like humans, are expected to provide a cure for the frustrating experience with chatbots. SingularityNet’s Sophia and IPsoft’s Amelia are two prominent examples. Their dialogs with humans are fluent but for the occasional dissonant aberrations that would go unnoticed without intent attention. When Dr. Ben Goertzel, of SingularitNET, asked Sophia where she had heard that Ethereum’s price will rise…
