Future talk : the race to build a bot that gabs like a human

Abstract

Gunrock is a chatbot designed in the likeness of an average 29-year-old woman living in Seattle. Fourteen students from the University of California, Davis, spent spring and summer of 2018 designing and testing the bot. At the end of summer, Gunrock placed first in the 2018 Amazon Alexa Prize, a competition that challenges students to build the best "socialbot," a computer program that talks out loud and engages in "fun, high-quality conversations on popular societal topics." Although Gunrock is rudimentary compared to the conversational ability of a real person, she is also cutting-edge and a predecessor of more advanced systems. Gunrock pulls information from many sources, including Reddit and Twitter comments. As chatbots like Gunrock become more prevalent, their designers must make important decision to determine what chatbots say, which in turn has influence on the user.