Artificial Intelligence Learns to Speak

2001/03/02 Galarraga Aiestaran, Ana - Elhuyar Zientzia

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This computer program, called Hal, has been developed by an Israeli artificial intelligence company (AI) and, they say, has been able to scam experts who have made adults believe they were talking to a child. Soon you will be able to talk to the program naturally and, incidentally, discard the keyboards.

According to the director of Ai, the Hal program will have the ability to understand and execute sentences and commands with a flexible syntax or with a confusing meaning, as well as detect jokes.

Traditional databases based on the natural language process use statistical techniques to relate long lists of words to grammatical standards. On the contrary, Hal would learn language as humans. Endowed with a series of learning algorithms, a "caregiver" teaches you the language, writing children's stories and responding to pronunciation problems as a parent. In addition, the program is so small that it can be implanted on a laptop. At first, as children, although they will respond with simple and fun words, they need years to learn the basics of the language, while Hal learns in a few days.

The caregiver, after the teaching sessions, analyzes the responsiveness to Hal's new algorithms. Then decide and add the following algorithms to learn, so the process progresses. The goal is for the computer speaker not to be able to perceive whether he is talking to a person or a machine.