Having Meaningful Conversations

I recently tried the Alexa Chatbot 'winner', and was not impressed overall.  The piece below addresses this.   Real, meaningful (not just tricking someone into thinking its a person) conversation remains hard.  It is a holy  grail of AI.  Having a contextually meaningful, memory and knowledge enabled, goal focused, creative conversation is the most important part of human intelligence. 

Amazon is trying to make Alexa more chatty—but it’s very, very difficult  In Technology Review

The online retailer held a competition to have graduate students make its personal assistant into a more conversational bot. Nobody won.

Getting to know you: In a contest dubbed Alexa Prize, Amazon challenged 15 teams to build “a socialbot that can converse coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics for 20 minutes.” Three made it to the final round. The prize? Besides bragging rights, there was a cool $1 million on offer.  .... "