Certainly an impressive result, and may have some practical application for easing the burden of repeatedly answering the same question asked in different ways.

Certainly an impressive result, and may have some practical application for easing the burden of repeatedly answering the same question asked in different ways. I'm not sure I would call this passing the Turing test though. The picture at the top of the original article[1] is very informative. The bot does a passable job of answering the initial question, but it seems like a canned response and when the student asks for a more in-depth explanation, a different human TA had to step in and take over. Then a couple other students in the same thread actually post that they have suspicions whether or not "Jill" is a real person. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/05/11/this-professor-stunned-his-students-when-he-revealed-the-secret-identity-of-his-teaching-assistant/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/05/1... (Credit to exodust for posting it in a different comment)