In addition to being one of the fathers of computer science, Alan Turing postulated a very simple test for when computers move beyond calculations and start engaging in what we might consider thought. For Turing, the ultimate test was whether a person, engaged in a text-based conversation with a machine, would believe that it was conversing with another human.

Each year, the University of Reading hosts a competition where software is put to this test, with the winner taking home the Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence. This year's winner, called Elbot, came within one judge of passing the test, but its success may be less important than the underlying technology: Elbot is the product of a company that promises its software can help companies take the requirement for humans out of live chats and e-mail.

Over a dozen competitors took part in this year's contest, including older favorites like ALICE and Jabberwacky, both of which wound up among the six finalists. Elbot took home the Loebner Prize by convincing three of a dozen judges that it was human; it and most of the rest of the bots received high scores for portions of their conversation.

Typically, fooling 30 percent of people is considered a pass on the Turing Test, so this suggests that the combination of fast processors and sophisticated software is on the verge of passing the test.

It's worth pointing out that having a computer pass the test is likely to tell us something about Turing's standard for artificial intelligence, rather than conclusively demonstrate that computers have reached something that approximates intelligence. So far, the software behind the chat bots doesn't seem to involve the sort of wide-ranging intellectual capacity that we tend to file under "intelligence."

Nevertheless, the chat bots can extract a degree of information from a sentence and formulate a response that's generally at least peripherally related to the matter at hand, as you can tell from a visit to the winner. I started two chats with Elbot with roughly the same question and had wildly different results. Sometimes, it was clear that the software was grasping for anything in what I typed that it could work with, but at other times it seemed positively witty and thoughtful, such as when it concluded, "My guesses would probably be more interesting than the actual answer."

What was most striking to me, however, was the company that was putting Elbot up on the web. Artificial Solutions' home page comes with a chat bot in the top corner—when asked about the Loebner Prize, it was happy to tell me, "Loebner? Elbot (www.elbot.com) won a contest with that name, I heard. Must be some kind of 'best piece of garbage' contest." Why is a company interested in chat bots, rudely dismissive or otherwise?

Welcome to the next generation of tech support. The company sells an e-mail analysis system that promises to perform a natural language analysis of incoming mail and formulate a reply, attaching any relevant documents. The response is forwarded to a live human to determine if the software got it right, but it obviously has the potential to take some of the drudge work out of a number of potential duties.

In the same manner, an interactive chat assistant can be posted on a company support page, where it will engage in a full-fledged, Turing-like conversation and attempt to determine what a user is looking for. If it's successful, no real human time will have been wasted in answering an easy question. If it fails, the human it forwards the problem to can rely on the chat transcript to quickly get up to speed.

These capabilities are obviously an extension of existing automated support systems, and they only require a fairly specialized sort of intelligence. Having been driven to the verge of violence by both automated and human support, I can't tell whether this represents a good trend or not.