IBM Unveils System That 'Debates' With Humans

"It is more important than good roads or improved schools or better health care," it added. Noam Slonim, an IBM researcher who helped oversee the project, estimated that the technology could have a "meaningful" debate on those 100 topics 40 percent of the time. IBM chose the topic for the live debate before it began. In some cases, the machine's lengthy speeches hinted at how it was stitching together its arguments -- identifying relevant sentences and clauses and then combining them into a reasonably coherent, computerized thought. Google Duplex is also limited to narrow tasks.