Is a Chat with a Bot a Conversation?

You are at the Princess's ball, and she is telling you a secret, but her orchestra of bears is making such a fearful lot of noise you cannot hear what she is saying. What do you say, dear? I'd lean in closer and say, "Could you repeat that? The bear-itone section is a bit too enthusiastic tonight!" In 1958, the year the illustrated children's book "What Do You Say, Dear?" appeared, the leaders of a field newly dubbed "artificial intelligence" spoke at a conference in Teddington, England, on "The Mechanisation of Thought Processes." Marvin Minsky, of M.I.T., talked about heuristic programming; Alan Turing gave a paper called "Learning Machines"; Grace Hopper assessed the state of computer languages; and scientists from Bell Labs débuted a computer that could synthesize human speech by having it sing "Daisy Bell" ("Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do . .