June 9, 2009
The tumultuous history of Dialog Systems
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.
