Intelligent Machines: Chatting with the bots - BBC News

One of the ultimate aims of artificial intelligence is to create machines we can chat to. A computer program that can be trusted with mundane tasks - booking our holiday, reminding us of dentist appointments and offering useful advice about where to eat - but also one that can discuss the weather and answer offbeat questions. Alan Turing, one of the first computer scientists to think about artificial intelligence, devised a test to judge whether a machine was "thinking". He suggested that if, after a typewritten conversation, a human was fooled into believing they had talked to another person rather than a computer program, the AI would be judged to have passed. These days we chat to machines on a regular basis via our smart devices.