PROFESSOR JOHN A. BARNDEN

To give his bots an extra boost, he's turning to call-center data. Carpenter has begun working with a firm in Japan, and if his plan succeeds, he says his "chat bots" may eventually be able to take over the roles of human operators.
 
This sort of statistical brute force approach to artificial intelligence has a lot of promise, says John Barnden, an AI researcher at the University of Birmingham, U.K., and one of the judges at this year's Loebner Prize, which was held in London. "There is enough evidence to suggest that it's worth trying." However, it won't be easy, he says. While Barnden suspects that training a bot on call-center data will work for an automated program designed to handle customer calls, it will probably take a broader range of knowledge and data to make it pass the coveted Turing Test, or at least the Loebner Prize version of it...
 
Carpenter will have to be careful, though, Barnden says; not only will a call-center chat bot have to be capable of managing the emotions of customers, it also will have to do so without resorting to the abusive language sometimes used by human callers.