Sylvain Paillard

Chinese version - 中文

The idea of a Dialog System is probably as old as the field of computer science itself.  It is hard to know if Charles Babbage already thought about it in the 1830s when he created his  Analytical Engine and then his Difference Engine; but it is clear that Alan Turing set the definition of the ultimate Dialog System when he described the Turing Test in his paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence in 1950.

From Wikipedia -   The “standard interpretation” of the Turing Test, in which player C, the interrogator, is tasked with trying to determine which player - A or B - is a computer and which is a human. The interrogator is limited to only using the responses to written questions in order to make the determination.

Turing predicted that machines would eventually be able to pass the test and that 30% of human judges would be fooled in a five-minute test by the year 2000.  Futurist Raymond Kurzweil updated it to 2020 in 1990 and revised it to 2029 in 2005.

This last prediction appears to me as uncertain as any of the prior ones, but many interesting Dialog Systems have been developed already and, thankfully, the market does not need the Turing Test to be passed to start adopting them.

Turing Test version 3.png

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I spoke as Keynote Speaker at the Webcom event in Montréal the 13th of May 2009.

The main goal of this speech was to explain why technologies driven by Artificial Intelligence are going to be the key success factor to provide a positive customer experience online. The main reason I advanced is that the complexity of the task of satisfying all the different of the customer requests properly is way too high to be managed with any traditional approach.

You can find here the main content of this speech: the Presentation slides and the video of the keynote as well as an short interview I gave the same day (unfortunately, the videos are in French).

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