Cleverbot is an AI web application that learns how to mimic human conversations by communicating with humans. It was created by AI veteran Rollo Carpenter, who also created Jabberwacky, a similar web application. In the first decade of its existence after being created in 1988, Cleverbot held several thousand conversations with Carpenter and his associates. Since being launched on the web in 1997, the number of conversations has exceeded 65 million.
Cleverbot, a learning Artificial Intelligence conversationalist, took part alongside humans in a formal Turing Test at the Techniche 2011 festival at IIT Guwahati, India on the 3rd of September. The results from 1,334 votes were announced September 4th 2011. Cleverbot was judged to be 59.3% human, far exceeding expectations. The humans in the event achieved just 63.3%.
"That is rather an amazing figure. It’s higher than even I was expecting, or even, really, hoping for," said British AI scientist Rollo Carpenterduring a lecture at the Techniche festival. "The figures from yesterday’s test exceeded 50%, and you could argue all this to mean that Cleverbot has now passed the Turing Test, here at Techniche 2011."
Cleverbot differs from traditional chatterbots in that the user is not holding a conversation with a bot that directly responds to entered text. Instead, when the user enters text, the algorithm selects previously entered phrases from its database of prior conversations. It has been claimed that "talking to Cleverbot is a little like talking with the collective community of the Internet."[4]
