8 ms·

Siri meets Eliza

254 points by user24 15y ago

rauljara 15y ago
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 15y ago
  Siri: We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do it.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
drzaiusapelord 15y ago
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.
- ugh 15y ago
  That’s the point, though, isn’t it? I think Weizenbaum was pretty devastated when people actually took it serious.
- sp332 15y ago
  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 https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/ELIZA
- vidarh 15y ago
  Using open-ended questions and parroting mirrors what good human listeners do. We treat it as lazy only because we know that in this instance it happens because it's the easy way out of a situation where the program doesn't have another response.
epaga 15y ago
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 15y ago
  There's an amusing prank where you call two Chinese restaurants: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz9ra9FqNKQ 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 15y ago
    Related call where 2 sex line workers are let loose on each other: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoyDQ327mm8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoyDQ327mm8
- mseebach 15y ago
  Not that I have any experiences in this regard, but I hear that SkypeOut and the conferencing feature is ... convenient.
- CodeMage 15y ago
  Reminds me of Calvin & Hobbes: http://picayune.uclick.com/comics/ch/1986/ch860927.gif http://picayune.uclick.com/comics/ch/1986/ch860927.gif
- scw 15y ago
  Back in the days of phreaking, this was called a 'Cheese Box' and was used to great effect by calling two locations of any chain. From what I recall, a report in Phrack called two 711 employees who started yelling at each other 'NO, THIS IS 711, WHO IS THIS‽'
sspencer 15y ago
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.
brudgers 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
beloch 15y ago
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-tests_id23140 http://www.phonearena.com/news/Apple-iPhone-4S-benchmark-tes... ) 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 15y ago
  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...)
- LXicon 15y ago
  i think it says more about how simple real humans are when they interact with each other. as limited as Eliza is, it has worked many times. how many times a day have you had face-to-face interactions with people that are simply canned responses. i remember keeping a phone call going with high-school girlfriend by randomly responding with one of the following : "uh-huh", "yeah" or "really".
sendos 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      I guess you don't interact much with kids. 3 year olds will give great conversation and sometimes very interesting insights.
dhughes 15y ago
"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.
fl3tch 15y ago
The Singularity is not near. :)
mrweasel 15y ago
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.
cadr 15y ago
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 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.
hugh3 15y ago
I'm just bummed that he stopped the experiment before Mr Jose Fuentes got involved.
un1xl0ser 15y ago
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. ;)
JacobIrwin 15y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY AI vs. AI. Two chatbots talking to each other

254 points by user24 15y ago

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 15y ago
Siri: We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do it.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

drzaiusapelord 15y ago

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.

ugh 15y ago
That’s the point, though, isn’t it? I think Weizenbaum was pretty devastated when people actually took it serious.
sp332 15y ago
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 https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/ELIZA
vidarh 15y ago
Using open-ended questions and parroting mirrors what good human listeners do. We treat it as lazy only because we know that in this instance it happens because it's the easy way out of a situation where the program doesn't have another response.

epaga 15y ago

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 15y ago
There's an amusing prank where you call two Chinese restaurants: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz9ra9FqNKQ 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 15y ago
  Related call where 2 sex line workers are let loose on each other: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoyDQ327mm8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoyDQ327mm8
mseebach 15y ago
Not that I have any experiences in this regard, but I hear that SkypeOut and the conferencing feature is ... convenient.
CodeMage 15y ago
Reminds me of Calvin & Hobbes: http://picayune.uclick.com/comics/ch/1986/ch860927.gif http://picayune.uclick.com/comics/ch/1986/ch860927.gif
scw 15y ago
Back in the days of phreaking, this was called a 'Cheese Box' and was used to great effect by calling two locations of any chain. From what I recall, a report in Phrack called two 711 employees who started yelling at each other 'NO, THIS IS 711, WHO IS THIS‽'

sspencer 15y ago

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.

brudgers 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.

beloch 15y ago

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-tests_id23140 http://www.phonearena.com/news/Apple-iPhone-4S-benchmark-tes... ) 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 15y ago
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...)
LXicon 15y ago
i think it says more about how simple real humans are when they interact with each other. as limited as Eliza is, it has worked many times. how many times a day have you had face-to-face interactions with people that are simply canned responses. i remember keeping a phone call going with high-school girlfriend by randomly responding with one of the following : "uh-huh", "yeah" or "really".

sendos 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    I guess you don't interact much with kids. 3 year olds will give great conversation and sometimes very interesting insights.

dhughes 15y ago

"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.

fl3tch 15y ago

The Singularity is not near. :)

mrweasel 15y ago

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.

cadr 15y ago

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 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.

hugh3 15y ago

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

un1xl0ser 15y ago

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. ;)

JacobIrwin 15y ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY AI vs. AI. Two chatbots talking to each other