Have you tried speaking to Siri or Alexa just for the fun of it? While they have advanced quite a bit from when they were originally launched, they are in no way ready to have a human-like conversation.
For the most part, they are programmed with specific replies to specific queries and for others, they may give you a generic reply. In fact, sometimes it's hard to make them understand the very commands for which they are programmed to respond.
With this experience, it can be difficult to imagine there might exist a piece of software somewhere which has near-human conversation skills. After all, the software is just software. It has no original thought, emotions, life experiences, desires, preferences or anything else that would contribute towards a good conversation.
But if we have learned something from technological innovations in the past few decades, it is that we are always left surprised when something that was deemed impossible or "too hard" finally becomes a reality. Will the same happen with human-like software too?
Meena - Google's Chatbot
In a recent report, it was mentioned that Google has developed a chatbot that they are calling Meena. They are claiming that it is much better than any other chatbot they have ever tested. In fact, it is so good that it is almost like talking to a human.
The company even developed a special metric to measure the chatbot's (which is an AI) conversational skills. The metric is called the "Sensibleness and Specificity Average".
The way it works is, Google employs humans to have free conversations with Meena. Every time it responds, the person has to answer two questions about the response. The first one relates to whether Meena made logical and contextual sense and the second was whether it was specific to the conversation.
This metric was used to measure the conversation skills of other chatbots and they returned values between 31% and 56%. Meena, however, scored 79%. A human being would score 89% on the same metric. That means Meena is very close to being able to converse like a human. If it is developed further, it could very well reach that level.
It will be interesting to see how technologies like these evolve and how they are used in the modern world. Will we see future humans develop a relationship with their smartphone's software? That would be like the movie "Her"!!