Type of site Chatterbot Website www.cleverbot.com Registration None | Alexa rank 31,549 (August 2015) Current status Active | |
Cleverbot is a chatterbot web application that uses an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to have conversations with humans. It was created by British AI scientist Rollo Carpenter. It was preceded by Jabberwacky, a chatbot project that began in 1988 and went online in 1997. In its first decade, Cleverbot held several thousand conversations with Carpenter and his associates. Since launching on the web, the number of conversations held has exceeded 200 million. Besides the web application, Cleverbot is also available as an iOS, Android, and Windows Phone app.
Contents
Operation
Unlike some other chatterbots, Cleverbot's responses are not pre-programmed. Instead, it learns from human input: Humans type into the box below the Cleverbot logo and the system finds all keywords or an exact phrase matching the input. After searching through its saved conversations, it responds to the input by finding how a human responded to that input when it was asked, in part or in full, by Cleverbot.
Cleverbot participated in a formal Turing test at the 2011 Techniche festival at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati on September 3, 2011. Out of the 334 votes cast, Cleverbot was judged to be 59.3% human, compared to the rating of 63.3% human achieved by human participants. A score of 50.05% or higher is often considered to be a passing grade. The software running for the event had to handle just 1 or 2 simultaneous requests, whereas online Cleverbot is usually talking to around 80,000 people at once.
Developments
Cleverbot is constantly learning, growing in data size at a rate of around 5 million interactions per day. Updates to the software have been mostly behind the scenes. In 2014, Cleverbot was upgraded to use GPU serving techniques. The program chooses how to respond to users fuzzily, the whole of the conversation being compared to the millions that have taken place before. Cleverbot now uses over 360 million interactions to respond, based on about 3% of the conversations it has ever held. The developers of Cleverbot are attempting to build a new version using machine learning techniques.
A part of the engine behind Cleverbot has been made available to developers in the form of Cleverscript. An official API for accessing Cleverbot serving for has been made available to developers at cleverbot.com/api.
An app that uses the Cleverscript engine to play a game of 20 Questions, has been launched under the name Clevernator. Unlike other such games, the player asks the questions and it is the role of the AI to understand, and answer factually. An app that allows owners to create and talk to their own small Cleverbot-like AI has been launched, called Cleverme! for Apple products.
In early 2017, a Twitch stream of two Google Home devices modified to talk to each other using Cleverbot.io garnered over 700,000 visitors and over 30,000 peak concurrent viewers.