Hi,
I’m developing a three day holiday programme on robotics for 10-14 year olds and want to include a session on AI and chatbots. I’m looking for an online chatbot with kid friendly vocabulary who has a human back story. I quite like the look of Mitsuku and Jeeney but haven’t spent enough time with them to know if they are completely kid friendly.

Here is what I’m planning to do. This session was inspired by Tim Bell’s computer science unplugged text book.

The students (class of 20 or so) will conduct a mock Loebner Prize test.

Two students will leave the room and flip a coin to see who will be the ‘chatbot’ and who will be the human. The person who is the chatbot will be connected online to a real chatbot.

The rest of the class has to ask questions of the chatbot and human (via a messenger) to see as a group if they can figure out who is who. I’ll be providing some of the questions and the students will provide some as well. I’ll be vetting the questions to make sure they are suitable.

I’m thinking of doing two rounds. The first with an older chatbot who will be easy to spot and the second round with a recent chatbot.

Which chatbots do you think I should choose? Do you have any comments on the session that I am planning?

Thanks in advance.

Hi Amy and welcome.
Although Skynet-AI will not pose as a human, it might serve your needs if you had the student pose as the robot.
A high school in England just ran a similar exercise last month for children of the same age.

Skynet-AI is pretty kid friendly, with mild Sci-Fi suggestive violence (it may want to take over the world).

English Tutor might also be a good choice, it is designed to teach English, pretends to be human and is one of the finalists in the Loebner Prize.

Hi Amy,

I wrote Mitsuku and can assure you it is totally child friendly. She will discourage swearing or sex talk and will even give out 5 warnings before banning repeat offenders. A great deal of her visitors are teenagers and children from about 9 upwards so it is important to me to keep it clean. Besides, she learns nothing from people repeatedly asking her for sex or swearing it her.

I also try to encourage educational use like you are doing and if there are any specific responses you would like her to say, please let me know and I can include them for your session. Something like:

Human: Who is Amy?
Bot: Amy is running this chatbot test

The bot at http://www.mitsuku.com will not pretend to be human but, I have a mock Turing test with a more human version of her at: http://www.square-bear.co.uk/mitsuku/turing/ if it is something your class might be interested in. The children can talk to the bot for 5 minutes before deciding whether they were talking to a human or a robot.

So far, just over 23% believed the robot was a human. I would rather not discuss on a public board how this test works behind the scenes but please feel free to drop me an email at info (at) mitsuku (dot) com if you wish to discuss anything.

Hi Amy

some remarks from a real junior among botmasters ...

afaik, Jeeney is family friendly too, but ask her “father” Cameron Jones to be perfectly sure.

I know a chatbot that passed a Turing test of the kind you described - an audience that asked a bunch of independent questions to a human and the bot. (That bot is the German-speaking “Das Brain” (http://www.chatbots.org/chatbot/das_brain/), btw.)

From the transcripts of that Turing test it is evident that the bot won the competition because it responded to the question more unpredictably and more moodily than the human. To those that know the way chatbots “think”, they reveal themselves rather soon if you try to have a coherent conversation with them (unless the human intentionally mimicks a chatbot, of course).

So, the results could be very different depending on whether you take a list of pre-selected questions, or have a real conversation with the bot.

I’d recommend Mitsuku too, for she is of all the hundreds of bots that I know one of the most advanced ones, and among the family friendly bots the one with the best answering skills. Maybe she’ll fail the Turing test due to her being too friendly, though.

Steve, didn’t you have a Loebner prize version of Mitsuku one could talk to unlimited?

Peter Wolff - Jun 26, 2013:

Steve, didn’t you have a Loebner prize version of Mitsuku one could talk to unlimited?

Yes, I have one at the Chatbot Battles website:
http://www.square-bear.co.uk/mitsuku/housebot.htm

I am planning on copying this to my main site in order to get some input and chatlogs to fine tune it for the final in September, as there are still a lot of “robotic” answers in there.