Skip to content
Surprising Science

Computers Can’t Hold Conversation

Context, oblique cultural allusions, metaphors and so on are par for the course in human-to-human conversation, but entirely beyond machines, says a Turing Test participant.
Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

Computers’ ability to store and sort raw data is already beyond what many believed would ever be possible, but how can it be, then, that computers remain incapable of holding a natural conversation? The subtlety of human language, it turns out, is still a major hurdle to computer advancement: “With all due respect to Watson, it’s extremely difficult for computers to participate in conversations that aren’t restricted to a standardized format (i.e., a game of ‘Jeopardy!’). They have more information than we do, but they don’t improvise well.”

Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

Related
The Dr. Data Show is a new web series that breaks the mold for data science infotainment, captivating the planet with short webisodes that cover the very best of machine learning and predictive analytics.

Up Next
When the brain juggles two—or more—languages, there are positive consequences for the brain, says Ellen Bialystok, a psychology professor at York University in Toronto.