It’s really a lot of fun, but I wanted to take it a step further. I wanted to make my computer do more than talk like a person. I wanted to make my computer talk like a computer that’s pretending to be a person. I chose to target CleverBot for a couple reasons.

First, I was able to grab a little over 30,000 actual conversations with CleverBot. Second, CleverBot is an interesting system. It’s an online chat bot that learns to talk like a human, by talking to humans. It’s a very simple algorithm in that it remembers every response from a human it ever gets, and it remembers what it said to elicit that response from the human. If you ask CleverBot, “How are you?”, CleverBot will look through it’s history for every time “How are you?” was brought up in conversation, and it’ll pick a response based on the responses from its history. Because it’s responding with the inputs from actual humans, its responses should in theory be very human sounding.

So I fed CleverBot’s conversations into my RNN, henceforth named CleverBotBot (CBB). CBB doesn’t just generate text like CleverBot. CBB also generates entire conversations based on the ones that CleverBot has had. Below are a list of some of my favorite excerpts from the conversations it has created: