Chat about the news Tribune Content Agency LLC/Alamy Stock Photo

EVEN robots want to talk politics these days. Chatbots could soon be reading news articles and then discussing them with us.

Voice-activated assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri can check the weather but are left stumped by more complicated conversations, says Alan Black at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. Now Black and a team of computer speech researchers have launched a competition to create a chatbot that can understand a news or Wikipedia article and then talk about it with a human.

“I’d like to have a system that reads the news in the morning, and I’d like to be able to talk about the news without having to go read it myself,” Black says.


The winner of the Conversational Intelligence Challenge will be the team that the judges think has built the most engaging and convincing text-based chatbot. Evaluators will have to guess whether they’re talking to a bot or a human, then rate the quality and breadth of the discussion.

Black doesn’t expect a convincing chatbot to emerge in the competition’s first year. But Marilyn Walker at the University of California, Santa Cruz, thinks the stage is set for a big leap forward in the world of chatbots. “Things are really changing very, very rapidly,” she says.

Researchers now have better access to data sets of conversations used to build chatbots. And better speech recognition systems are making it easier for us to chat to robots in a more natural way.

“Chatbots designed for Amazon Echo devices must converse ‘coherently and engagingly’ with humans”

Walker and Black are both competing for the Alexa prize, a chatbot challenge run by Amazon. It tasks teams with building a speech-based chatbot for Amazon Echo devices that can converse with humans “coherently and engagingly” on a popular topic for 20 minutes.

The entries are now being put to the test by Echo customers in the US, with the best-performing team set to scoop a $500,000 prize when the winners are announced in November.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Talkative bots offer their take on the news”