Mitsuku Chatbot Wins Loebner Prize 2013
mikejuk writes "The final round of the 23rd annual Loebner Prize competition took place in Londonderry, Northern Ireland with four chatbots hoping to convince four judges that they were humans. Mitsuku, a chatbot that is kept busy chatting to people around the world, was awarded this year's bronze medal. Mitsuku's botmaster, Steve Worswick, used to run a music website. Once he added a chatbot he discovered more people visited to chat than for music so he concentrated all his efforts on the bot but he still regards it as a hobby. Mitsuku uses AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) and is a pandorabot, based on the free open-source-based community webservice the enables anyone who wants to, to develop and publish chatbots on the web."
Silver medal is actually for beating the Turing test (which of course has never happened and won't happen anytime soon). Gold medal is awarded for passing the Turing test based on more than just text input (talking with the bot, showing the bot stuff etc.).
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.