Chatterbox Challenge 2005: Geography of the Modern Eliza

The geography of a modern Eliza provides an illusion of natural language understanding. However, this is seen in very few of the hundred-plus programmes entered into Chatterbox Challenge 2005 (CBC 2005), a competition for artificial intelligence based on Turing’s measure for intelligence through textual dialogue. The author’s experience as one of the Judges in CBC 2005 has found that though not ’bathed in language experience’ like their human counterparts, artificial conversational entities (ACE) are able to maintain lengthy conversations. Eliza’s descendants respond at times humorously and with some knowledge but they lack metaphor use, the very feature of everyday human discourse. They find success as virtual assistants in single topic e-domains. But understanding remains in the head of the human user. Until metaphor design is included, ACE will remain as machine-like as Weizenbaum’s original.