Chatbot challenges will make AIs discuss the latest news

EVEN robots want to talk politics these days. Chatbots could soon be reading news articles and then discussing them with us. Voice-activated assistants such as Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri can check the weather but are left stumped by more complicated conversations, says Alan Black at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. Now Black and a team of computer speech researchers have launched a competition to create a chatbot that can understand a news or Wikipedia article and then talk about it with a human. "I'd like to have a system that reads the news in the morning, and I'd like to be able to talk about the news without having to go read it myself," Black says.