2016.October.26:
That future will likely include Sara and other forms of AI that think and behave like humans. And they’ll become an everyday part of our lives sooner than you might imagine.
Speaking with Sara certainly felt less jarring than talking to a regular chatbot. The system studies the words a person says during a conversation as well as the tone of his or her voice, also using several cameras to study the speaker’s facial expressions and head movements.
“There are a lot of chatbots out there that use social talk, but they use it randomly, and that’s not useful,” Cassell says. “In real humans, social talk is there to serve a purpose.”