
Siri meets Eliza - user24
http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2011/10/siri/
======
beloch
Although Eliza was coded for a less powerful machine, the most powerful
mainframe in existence in 1964 was the CDC6600, which was able to put out
about 1 MFLOPS. The iPhone 4S is apparently capable of 138 MFLOPS. (
[http://www.phonearena.com/news/Apple-iPhone-4S-benchmark-
tes...](http://www.phonearena.com/news/Apple-iPhone-4S-benchmark-
tests_id23140) )

We've managed to put the equivalent of hundreds of room-sized mainframes from
Eliza's time into something that can fit in your pocket but, in the last 47
years, A.I. has advanced so little that Siri is using the same bag of tricks
as Eliza. All that distinguishes Siri from Eliza is some licensed speech
recognition software, a nice collection of pre-programmed geeky easter-eggs,
and the fact that Siri is plugged into a collection of apps and search engines
that allow it to perform a few basic, but useful tasks beyond simply fooling
around. However, those tasks do not really require, or make use of, A.I. at
all. Google's voice interface for Android makes no pretensions towards
sentience, but is capable of everything Siri is. Google just hasn't wrapped
their voice interface software up in a cute anthropomorphized Eliza wrapper or
taken the app integration as far yet. That, and perhaps a little interface
work, is pretty much it.

It is simply astounding that, in spite of Siri having access to such vastly
superior resources, Eliza still comes across as the smart one!

~~~
dilap
Well, that's not really fair, because Siri isn't designed to try to have a
conversation -- it's designed to just get a few things done easily via voice
commands.

The state of the art in chatting is probably something more like Cleverbot,
which is way, way better at having a conversation than Eliza.

(It occurs to me that hooking Siri up to cleverbot would be pretty awesome...)

------
epaga
The best part of that page is comment #4 (quoting)...

Reminds me of conferencing calling two Dunkin’ Donuts together and listening
silently as hilarity ensued:

"Hello, Dunkin Donuts."

"Yes, this is Dunkin Donuts."

"Yes, this is Dunkin Donuts."

"Yes."

"Hello?"

"How can I help you?"

"This is Dunkin Donuts."

"Yes, it is!"

"Hello?"

It was the last time my friends’ parents let us use their fancy new (1983)
Merlin phone unsupervised.

~~~
Splines
There's an amusing prank where you call two Chinese restaurants:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz9ra9FqNKQ>

(I think they pulled this prank on a late night show as well, I can't find the
video though.)

~~~
bobbles
Related call where 2 sex line workers are let loose on each other:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoyDQ327mm8>

------
rauljara
Not exactly surprising results, but pretty entertaining.

Eliza had fewer non-sequiter's, generally kept up the conversation better.
Eliza pretty clearly wins the discussion. But Siri demonstrated beyond a doubt
that she is a woman of action by searching the web, finding businesses, and
calling people. By virtue of actions speaking louder than words, I declare
Siri the winner of the shouting match.

~~~
brudgers
Siri: We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do it.

------
drzaiusapelord
This conversation is like listening to some executive's over-caffeinated
assistant trying to help her boss's overly Xanax'd therapist. Not sure what
the take-away here is other than Eliza is such a lazy program. It just falls
back onto open-ended questions when confused and doesn't really do anything
productive at all.

~~~
sp332
Eliza is actually an AI-building platform. The "doctor" program was like a
Hello World, it didn't really show what the platform was capable of.
<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/ELIZA>

------
sendos
It's entertaining, but the thing that struck me most after reading that
"conversation" is how far we still have to go in AI.

That can also be taken as good news, ie there is still a lot to be
done/discovered in this interesting and very difficult field.

~~~
user24
I did a report during my undergrad (2005) on AI chatterbots and compared
various bots; they all had huge distances to go before approaching any kind of
real conversation. During my masters (2009) I studied computational
linguistics and found that the gap was even wider than I'd previously thought.
Even generating a natural sounding 2 sentence exchange is very difficult, let
alone a lengthy conversation, and as far as anything approaching genuine
understanding and insight? We don't even know where to begin yet.

~~~
kleiba
Yeah, but then again, it takes the human brain about 15-20 years before you
can have a somewhat reasonable conversation with its owner, and that's
dedicated hardware custom-built for that purpose.

~~~
ars
I guess you don't interact much with kids. 3 year olds will give great
conversation and sometimes very interesting insights.

------
mrweasel
Based on the following:

SIRI >> Sorry, I can’t provide maps and directions in Canada.

ELIZA >> Have you tried?

I would say that Eliza is smarter than Siri.

------
brudgers
A great hack and easily the funniest thing I've ever read on HN [damning with
faint praise unintentional].

Parry v Siri would might be Youtube worthy.

~~~
sabat
I was just going to suggest a match with Parry myself! Parry was seriously
better than Eliza and had a more natural tone. I'd love to see someone try
this. I'd try it, but I don't have an iPhone 4s and don't have a running Parry
engine.

------
fl3tch
The Singularity is not near. :)

------
cadr
This was very similar to an exercise we had in a class I took a decade or so
ago "Theory and Practice of Non-Linear and Interactive Narrative"
(<http://web.mit.edu/21w765j/www/Home.html>)

Also, I think they took 'yow' out of emacs at some point (or at least the
actual Zippy the Pinhead quotes - the command is still there), but the
"psychoanalyze-pinhead" command (which pipes random quotes from that comic
into Eliza) is _really_ trippy.

------
dhughes
"I lunge for the phone, stopping the experiment."

That's been my exercise (gym membership expired 3 years ago) as I try
different Android voice recognition apps. Add random people you no longer
remember on your Facebook account which is automatically put in my phone
contacts. It should be a sport.

------
hugh3
I'm just bummed that he stopped the experiment before Mr Jose Fuentes got
involved.

------
un1xl0ser
My Hobby: Proxying conversations with my cow-orkers to Eliza.

Try it, great stress relief. I've only done this once, and they did realize
what was going on. Will try to dig up the chatlog, but I doubt I can find it.

Appy polly loggies to the xkcd guy. ;)

------
sspencer
Anyone tried a Turing test on Siri yet? She'd fail the first time she tried to
call someone or do a web search, but if you could head her off before she can
try to do anything but answer it might be quite convincing.

------
JacobIrwin
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY>

AI vs. AI. Two chatbots talking to each other

