Am I talking to a software robot or a human? It’s a question that many of us will have posed at some point when we are online interacting with a web interface chatbot with its chirpy ‘Hi! Can I help?’ message flags and discussion box.

Some of us deliberately try and second guess these bots in order to be able to work out whether we are talking to a machine or a person. We do this because we somehow hope that this knowledge will enable us to assess more accurately how much help we are likely to get — and so, perhaps, get an idea of how much effort we should put into explaining our customer issues or requests.

Right now, it is not necessarily that difficult to know if you are speaking to an Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine. The Turing test was of course established to rate the point at which people can’t tell the difference between a human and a machine. The AI software robot ‘bots’ that have passed the Turing test so far have been given quirky personality traits to mask the challenges that even the best AI engines have when dealing with human conversational challenges.