<B>At last, a chatbot you can actually chat to</B><I>, New Scientist, March 18th, 2006</I><P><STRONG>From the Technology News section</STRONG>
<P>George, the winner of last year's illustrious Loebner prize for most convincing conversational program, has been given voice-recognition software so that people can to talk to him rather than typing in text. The new George, which also sports a 3D animated body and a computer-generated voice - by UK firm InterMediaLab - was launched last week at a British Computer Society meeting in Norwich.
<P>George has been designed to express a range of emotions in his voice and appearance. So moving to speech-based interaction should improve the quality of George's responses, says his creator Rollo Carpenter, because people talk more naturally than they type, and George uses their input to learn.
<P>Click on the image for the story:
<P><A HREF=http://www.newscientist.com/channel/info-tech/mg18925435.500-chatbot-george-gets-a-makeover.html TARGET=_New BORDER=0><IMG SRC=http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/covers/20060318.jpg BORDER=0></A>
.......................................
