“Conversational” AI Is Really Bad At Conversations

A read-only interlocutor is a robot troll.

Cryteria/CC BY 3.0

In 1977, my father, a computer scientist, brought home a teletype terminal (a keyboard and a printer, no screen) and an acoustic coupler (a box with two suction-cups that matched up with the speaker and mic on the receiver of a standard Bell phone), and he connected it to the DEC PDP minicomputer at the University of Toronto. I was…