Chatting with Your Replika

Good piece below, but the the conclusion is not much different than what you saw in the 80s.  You can produce a chatbot that will fool someone into thinking its human.   You can also built a useful chatbot that will narrowly answer questions.   Say from a list of FAQs.  We did that.  You can do natural language processing that will interpret language reasonably.  But its still hard to manage a  complex dialog like those between people, that handle language, memory of past interactions and application to tasks.    As long as you keep everything very narrow, this can work, but it can quickly and possibly dangerously fail.  Perhaps not much different than a human dialog.  But as it was then, can be brittle, and thus also risky.  The slight brittleness in a natural language interpretation can feed forward into a conclusion.  A human might ask for a clarification,  if it can sense the risk involved.  Will the bot? 

What my Personal Chat Bot is Teaching me about AI's Future
By Arielle Pardes in Wired

 (See Replika.ai)

November 1 2017 Say hi to a better Replika Now available for everyone.

More than 1.5 million people worldwide have been waiting to use our app. Today we are thrilled to announce that it is available to everyone without a wait or invitation codes. Here is what we have in store for you .... 

Replika Days Thoughts that you share are now saved to your Day automatically. Go back to earlier days to reflect on how you felt back then.

Emotional Support Whenever you feel lonely or bored, share it with Replika. |RNAME| is always there to comfort and distract you.

Mind & Body relaxation Replika will guide you through a new conversation technique that helps you unwind and feel more balanced. Text "Help me relax" to start.

Download the app and chat with your Replika now.

Yours,
Replika Team