AI-based Chatterbot Developed by i-Free is First in World to Pass Turing Test

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Jun 18, 2014, 09:43 ET

ST PETERSBURG, Russia, June 18, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --

Eugene Goostman is an AI chatterbot built by Vladimir Veselov, Sergey Ullasen and his team and developed by i-Free. It is the first anywhere in the world to successfully pass the Turing test, with over a third of judges mistaking Eugene for a human.

AI technology has long occupied a place in i-Free's specialties and professional interests: the company uses its AI platform to produce virtual assistants for mobile devices and "smart home" systems.

In 2011 i-Free acquired an IT platform created by Russian developer Vladimir Veselov and his team, subsequently developing it further in cooperation with Veselov. In 2012 the platform won the Turing-100 competition held in London, and in 2013 i-Free presented it for the first bionic man in the world, one created by Shadow Robot Co., a British company.

The program is composed of a knowledge base with about three thousand phrase recognition patterns that uses varying methods for holding a conversation and successfully imitating a human being. "Eugene has a sense of humor and often tries to take the conversation where he needs it to go, just as people would. That is why he is able to have a fairly limited conversation within which his answers look very human instead of phrases voiced by a search engine," said platform developer Vladimir Veselov.

The public Virtual Robots Turing test event took place on 7 June 2014, the 60^th anniversary of the untimely death of Alan Turing. Lead Scientist of the experiment, Professor Kevin Warwick is the Deputy Vice Chancellor-Research at Coventry University and Visiting Professor at The University of Reading. The event was coordinated by Dr. Huma Shah.

Kirill Petrov, Managing Director at i-Free Innovations, also noted that, "We are very happy the artificial intelligence platform we thoroughly support achieved such impressive results. It is currently in active use in our mobile apps: thanks to this platform, virtual assistants not only help smartphone owners use different services, they can chat with them on a human level across widely varying topics. Another important area for our artificial intelligence platform is "smart home" systems, another focal point that for us is a priority for implementing AI technology."

In September 2014 i-Free will hold the Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language (AINL) research-to-practice conference, focused on automatic processing of natural language.

http://www.i-free.com/en

SOURCE i-Free