[seanmcdirmid]

The thing is, we probably don't need hard AI yet to do some of this. Yes, it must be a dialogue system, but we have those today. We already saw the movement in this direction with Hugo Liu's concept.net work, but for some reason no one has followed up yet. We are getting to the point with speech rec/understanding technology that someone is bound to try again soon.

[eli_gottlieb]

In general, we don't need Hard AI for much anything, and usually don't want it. Any specific problem you want solved will require some specific solution method or algorithm rather than the whole and entire "make a computer hold an adequate water-cooler conversation" thing.