Catty: The chatbot with a Google brain

Michael Zalewski is an artificial-intelligence programmer who had a brilliant idea about chatbots. Most chatbots are limited by the fact that their creators need to laboriously tell them what to say; they try to anticipate everything you might say to the 'bot, then program in a suitable response. So of course, the 'bot can only grow as fast as a human can 'teach' it. That's why 'knowledge bases' — the bits of chat and information a 'bot has been endowed with — are so slow to evolve.