Virtual testing is expanding its reach to create simulations of the objects in our lives for faster, less expensive, and less wasteful safety – and that will save businesses money and safeguard their reputations. Sure, vehicles are safer than they've ever been. The automotive industry has used decades of crash-testing data to make cars safer and minimize the impact of accidents. But while vehicular design has changed drastically since Cadillacs ruled the roads, crash testing has evolved more slowly. The latest cars use different materials, are structured differently, and have different safety equipment. Yet crash test dummies are based on the average male in the 1970s – 5 foot, 9 inches tall and 171 pounds – and this model drives vehicle safety designs.

During the depths of winter, temperatures in Burlington, Vermont, a state in the US Northeast, can drop far below freezing. Robert, who asked CNN to use his first name only, lives by himself and avoids leaving the house during those times. He sits at the window of his waterfront apartment overlooking the icy expanse of Lake Champlain. He feels isolated and alone. The bot is available to talk online for free, via its webpage or in messenger apps such as Facebook or Skype. Marketed as a "virtual friend," she can converse or play games with the user.

This weekend Steve Worswick will be pushing the boundaries of what it is to be human, attempting to fool a panel of judges into thinking they are chatting to another person while really they will be talking to a chatbot. But Steve isn't an engineer at Apple or Amazon, he is a designer from Leeds and the AI he is hoping will pass the test - Mitsuku - is one you have probably never heard of. The competition he is taking part in, the Loebner Prize, is one of the only real-world Turing Tests but is also relatively obscure in the highly-hyped world of artificial intelligence - and not without controversy. This year could be the last time Steve competes - the sponsor Hugh Loebner, a millionaire inventor who made his fortune from brass fittings, died in 2016 so there is no longer funding for the prize. The competition sees four judges conducting a series of conversations with both humans and bots which they then score out of 100.

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.

Chatbots have captivated the tech world. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM all heavily invest in conversational platforms. Thousands of developers, businesses, and brands build bots to engage users, but one fact is clear... According to Botanalytics, 40 per cent of a bot's users disengage after one interaction. With thousands of bots launching every month, what growth strategies distinguish successful from useless ones?

Chatbot fever has infected Silicon Valley. The leaders of virtually every tech giant -- including Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple -- proclaim chatbots as the new websites, and messaging platforms as the new browsers. "You should message a business just the way you would message a friend," declared Mark Zuckerberg when he launched the Facebook Messenger Platform for bots. He and the rest of the tech world are convinced that conversation is the future of business. But is chatting actually good for bots?

A series of chatterbots will attempt to fool judges - including me - into thinking they are also human. No computer has ever triumphed at the Loebner Prize - a version of the Turing Test, first proposed by the computer scientist Alan Turing, who worked at Bletchley codebreaking during World War Two. Steve Worswick is the person behind Mistuku, a bot anyone can chat with online and which was judged the best system in the 2013 contest. "It's slowly becoming more and more involved in our everyday lives," he told Sky News. "At the stage we're at at the moment, I don't think we need to be fearing about people's jobs. "The use is in call centres, frequently asked questions on websites.