Abstract

Electronic communication has rapidly evolved over the last few decades, from using chat commands via Telnet and usenet, to making video calls via Skype and FaceTime. We can now simply speak to our mobile device when drafting an email or calling a friend instead of entering text with a keyboard. While computer-mediated communication has traditionally focused on human-to-human communication, a new paradigm may emerge that includes human conversations with artificial intelligence, given that talking “to” a computer is becoming as common as talking “through” a computer. It appears that it will not be long before we speak to a computer as if it was a human rather than just a machine. In 2011 Google introduced their voice search, and more recently, in 2014, a group of researchers claimed that a computer had for the first time passed the Turing test (University of Reading, 2014), a “test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human” (Wikipedia, 2015).

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