Question: How often do people realise that they are talking to a robot? Are certain races or cultures better at spotting if they are talking to a robot?

Huma Shah answered on 10 Nov 2016:

Hello Kieran, I believe you’re ID ‘A Top Notch Blok’ 🙂

Good question! I’ll begin by saying there’s one race, the human race but of course humans have created many cultures.

I’m going to explain virtual robots that are present as talk/chatbots across the web, because at the current level of technology it is easy to see that a physical robot is not a human.

From one experiment we found that in the mixed participant group with Chinese, Spanish and English university students, females and those younger than 25 scored virtual robots/ dialogue systems higher than males and those over 25. I aim to repeat the experiment to find if this result was particular to this experiment group. The participants were asked to talk with dialogue systems/chatbots on the Internet and score them for conversational ability against the oldest dialogue system, Eliza. You can read the highlights here:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563216300048

In our experiments most of the time participants can say they have been talking with a virtual robot/chatbot, without seeing or hearing them, just by basing their opinion on the answers to questions. However, as chatbots get better at human language it could become more difficult to distinguish human from machine from question-answer sessions.

Huma