It’s not that my chat-up style needs work, you understand. Instead, blame the limitations of artificial-intelligence software. Alice, you see, is a “chatbot”, a computer program that engages in conversations with humans – try her at alicebot.org. Pro­grammed by San Franciscan Richard Wallace, Alice has three times this decade won the annual Loebner contest for the most human-like form of AI. But when she was defeated last September by a British chatbot called George, a wave of excitement swept through this country’s AI programming community. If we could lead the way in making computers answer questions like real people, why not go the whole hog and build a new generation of synthesised TV personalities?

George, created by British programmer Rollo Carpenter as part of his Jabberwacky AI software, is constantly learning new language patterns and facts as he chats online at jabberwacky.com/chat-george, where he’ll respond not merely to words but also to any of 69 specified emotions, from “sarcastic” to “worried”. Now Carpenter’s firm, Icogno, is working with Norwich-based Televirtual to turn George into a “virtual human”, using animation and speech synthesis to have ever more credible spoken conversations. “It’s going to be possible to do a live interview with someone like George on television,” says Tim Child, who runs Televirtual. “He’s not ready yet for live TV, but it’s close.”

There are still a few details to iron out before Michael Parkinson need throw in the towel. But in a medium “peppered with D-list celebrities and artificial personalities”, as Child sees it, animated chatbots offer a genuinely “human” alternative. The games channels currently luring satellite viewers to call premium-rate lines, for instance, might be made “more efficient” if callers could interact with virtual characters. “Or you could have a virtual-human-hosted programme guide, with George’s style of AI tied to a knowledge database with the ability to communicate not only in speech but also able to lip-read and switch to different languages.” It could, Child suggests, be “less than a year” before the technology lets us interact to a satisfying degree with virtual TV stars.

Too bad, then, that my initial conversation with George – typed on to the Jabberwacky website – degenerated into a barrage of mutual insults. George quickly declared that he had “seen enough to know” that he was my intellectual superior and suggested that I was the bot. When I said I had never been so insulted, he answered: “Surely with a face like that you have...” Ah, says Child, George has unfortunately learnt to be a little short-tempered, and he does have an “attention-span problem”. Phew. For a moment, I thought it was personal.

david.rowan@thetimes.co.uk

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