Facebook releases its 'Blender' chatbot as an open-source project

The virtual assistants that inhabit our smartphones are helpful, sure, but they're not going to pass the Turing test any time soon. They're designed for understanding specific commands and actions like checking on restaurant reservations or getting updates on the weather, rather than, say, carrying on an in-depth conversation with a human. But chatbots could soon become far more loquacious thanks to Facebook, which this morning released a startlingly lifelike chatbot that it's been developing, dubbed Blender, as an open-source resource for AI research. Facebook has been pouring money and resources into its Natural Language Processing technologies for a few years now and those efforts appear to have paid off. The company claims that Blender is the single largest open-source chatbot created to date.