Cleverbot
Screenshot  | |
Type of site | Chatterbot |
|---|---|
| Created by | Rollo Carpenter |
| URL | www |
| Registration | None |
Cleverbot is a web application that uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to have conversations with humans. Cleverbot is the algorithm and data behind the very popular websites Cleverbot, Evie and Boibot. Cleverbot's algorithm has developed in complexity over time, but the core concept was invented by Rollo Carpenter in 1982 as a conversational feedback loop. Every time the user says something, Cleverbot learns it and then chooses an optimal reply from past learning. Rollo began working on the algorithm more seriously in 1988, and it went online under the name Jabberwacky in 1996. In 2006 it was rebranded as Cleverbot and in 2007, talking on behalf of the company Existor Ltd, the avatar Evie joined Cleverbot. Both have also been released as smartphone apps.
Operation
Unlike other chatterbots, Cleverbot's responses are not programmed. Instead, it "learns" from human input; Humans type into the box below the Cleverbot logo and the system finds all keywords or an exact phrase matching the input. The core of Cleverbot is a database recording every conversational interaction it has. It is estimated that since starting to learn online in 1996 Cleverbot has had 7 or 8 billion total interactions. Dealing with such quantities of data is challenging. Storage and processing requirements dictate how much data can be kept and actively used at any one time. Cleverbot is currently accumulating new data at a rate of between around 4 and 7 million interactions per day. There are a total of about 1.4 billion of these interactions. However, to formulate a reply Cleverbot currently uses 'only' 279 million of the interactions, about 3-4% of all the data it has ever learned. Even using this amount of data requires a lot of optimisation. To deal with this there are several fast servers with large graphics cards for GPU processing, along with and optimisations at every level of serving.
Cleverbot participated in a formal Turing test at the 2011 Techniche festival at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati on September 3, 2011. Out of the 334 votes cast, Cleverbot was judged to be 59.3% human, compared to the rating of 63.3% human achieved by human participants. A score of 50.05% or higher is often considered to be a passing grade.[2] The software running for the event had to handle just 1 or 2 simultaneous requests, whereas online Cleverbot is usually talking to around 80,000 people at once.
Developments
Cleverbot is constantly "learning", growing in data size, and perhaps also in the degree of "intelligence" it appears to display. Updates to the software have been mostly behind the scenes. In 2014 Cleverbot was upgraded to use GPU serving techniques.[3] The program chooses how to respond to users fuzzily, and contextually, the whole of the conversation being compared to the millions that have taken place before. The Cleverbot database now has over 265 million rows, using several Big Data techniques and more recently with Machine Learning.[citation needed]
A significant part of the engine behind Cleverbot, and an API for access to serving, has been made available to developers in the form of Cleverscript.
Cleverbot RNN Language Model The current machine learning work involves using the Cleverbot data to train a language model to generate conversational replies. This work is in its early stages.
See also
References
- ^ "Cleverbot.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-04-01.
- ^ Aron, Jacob (6 September 2011). "Software tricks people into thinking it is human". New Scientist. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
- ^ "Parallel Processing on Graphics Cards - Existor.com - Cleverbot". Existor.com. 2014-02-05. Retrieved 2014-06-09.
