Intelligent Agents: Conversations from Human-Agent Imitation Games (original) (raw)

What do humans say/ask beyond initial greetings? Are humans always the best at conversation? How easy is it to distinguish an intelligent human from an ‘intelligent agent’ just from their responses to unrestricted questions during a conversation? This paper presents an insight into the nature of human communications, including behaviours and interactions, from a type of interaction - stranger-to-stranger discourse realised from implementing Turing’s question-answer imitation games. The authors contend that the effects of lying, misunderstanding, humour and lack of shared knowledge during human-machine and human-human interactions can provide an impetus to building better conversational agents, increasingly deployed as virtual customer service agents, and needed in robots, for example as companions for the elderly. But do we always want these agents to talk like humans do?