Humans Defeat A.I. in Debate. For Now.

Stand aside, Siri and Alexa. An IBM team led by artificial intelligence (A.I.) researcher Noam Slonim has devised a system that does not merely answer questions; it debates the questioners. In a contest against champion human debaters, Slonim's Project Debater, which speaks with a female voice, impressed the judges. She didn't win, but that could change. As her developers explain in a March Nature article, Project Debater's computational argumentation technology consists of four main modules.