Any technology can be used for good or evil purposes. And chatbots are no exception. Most chatbots are there to help you get the answer you need in the fastest possible way. Good chatbots show empathy and make sure the conversation with a visitor feels as natural as possible.
But the goal is never to fool the human, which could even be illegal in some regions. But there are always exceptions. Especially in dating apps. In this post, I give you some hints to detect when you are talking to a malicious bot. General knowledge bots able to talk about almost anything are very challenging to build.
This is why for many years, the turing test was considered a key measure of artificial intelligence not really the case nowadays but this more of a philosophical discussion for another day. The following two images depict my quick conversations with two general chatbots that are available for you to play with: Kuki and UberBot. As you can see, they got lost rather quickly, even if, as Loebner Prize finalists they are also supposed to be top-notch. This just proves how difficult to make a bot able to understand anything!.
Chatbots typically reply using the same answer pattern every time you ask the same question. Humans are not good at that, even if we try. They will not be aware of anything that happened in the world since the last time they were trained. And only very advanced bots will come with some search functionality to go search online for recent events. So ask for recent events. Even better, local ones.
And have fun with the answer. Ah, and ambiguity is also something they are really not good at. When we are faced with ambiguous expressions we use all our own social context and past experiences to try to assign the right meaning to the sentence. Bots cannot rely on that and making this knowledge explicit is another major hurdle for bot designers.
