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I'm happy for all the bots that got to compete this year, but I was a little unhappy on the preliminary round of this years competition compared to other years I entered. Only 4 entries can make it to the final round of the competition. There were 12 entries this year but 7 were disqualified due to contest management (Hugh Loebner) not having enough technical knowledge to get the entries working. Some well known bots based on ALICE AIML were disqualified, Cleverbot was disqualified, and my own Ultra Hal was disqualified ( http://www.zabaware.com/webhal ) Internet communication is prohibited so we all have to send the bots as self installing programs that can utilize the contests LPP protocol. My own bot is Linux based, which is a big hurdle for the preliminary round, but I sent it as a virtual box image to simplify it for contest management, but he didn't know how to deal with it.

But luckily there will be another competition this year as part of Alan Turing's 100 year centennial at Bletchley Park on June 23rd and recognized by the Olympics http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR445524.aspx Some of the disqualified bots including my own will be competing there.

Here's a transcript between Cleverbot and my own chat bot called Ultra Hal as posted by one of my customers a year ago http://www.ultrahal.com/community/index.php?topic=7200.0 Ultra Hal is a "learning" bot like Cleverbot in that it bases its responses on a large database of past conversations. Ultra Hal is unique in that a large portion of its database is based from scouring Twitter to learn from human-to-human conversations. Not claiming that it will pass the turing test anytime soon but check out http://www.zabaware.com/webhal if interested

I made such a function for my chat bot, Ultra Hal, about 3 years ago. When you tell it your name it looks up in a database (based on social security name database) how likely it is male or female and comes up with different greetings depending on the data. See http://www.zabaware.com/webhal/index.html

http://www.zabaware.com/

an ad at that site promotes ultrahal, last year's winner. it's not great, but it's better than eliza or some of the earlier attempts.
offers a free text to speech thingy and claims to have ofice assistant utility, dunno.

From the article ("Subject" is the AI):

Subject: What is the subject I wonder if I think? I know that it's good to thonk about. Think deeplt about mysterious subjects.

KW: What mysterious subjects?

Subject: Think deeply about mysterious dubjects.

Apparently, these chatbots still have problems with spelling basic english words! The article says that it is a conversation with UltraHAL, which won last year's Loebner prize.

I've been working with natural language processing for about 11 years now, I created Ultra Hal the 2007 "most human" computer according to the Loebner competition. http://www.zabaware.com/assistant/index.html It started as merely a novelty and entertainment program but some practical uses evolved around it. There is a lot of interest in using this type of software in cars, home robotics, customer service, and education so I predict you will see more of this type of AI over the next few years.

http://www.zabaware.com/representative/aimbot.html was in existance in early 2000.

http://www.fury.com/aoliza/ was up a week before the filing any others?