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Surprising Science

Computers Can’t Hold Conversation

Context, oblique cultural allusions, metaphors and so on are par for the course in human-to-human conversation, but entirely beyond machines, says a Turing Test participant.
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Computers’ ability to store and sort raw data is already beyond what many believed would ever be possible, but how can it be, then, that computers remain incapable of holding a natural conversation? The subtlety of human language, it turns out, is still a major hurdle to computer advancement: “With all due respect to Watson, it’s extremely difficult for computers to participate in conversations that aren’t restricted to a standardized format (i.e., a game of ‘Jeopardy!’). They have more information than we do, but they don’t improvise well.”

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