Down the Rabbit Hole! Rona's Adventures in Chatbotland

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Sound familiar? It's from a story about a little girl who falls down a rabbit hole! While there, she meets many wonderful and strange creatures. Some of them are rather more difficult to understand than others. 

Today I visited this site: www.jabberwacky.com and I also met some weird and wacked out characters! This is a site where you can 'chat' with a 'bot' that is supposed to make natural, human-sounding conversation with you. It has been suggested that you might use it with language students. Students can chat, get naturalistic, meaningful responses, and practice conversation skills.

It was a bit like talking with a hookah smoking caterpillar...well, maybe exactly like talking to a hookah smoking caterpillar, since its first words were also "Who are you?"

First, I chatted with 'Joan'. She is a very professional looking avatar with a lovely British accent which only makes her pointed sarcasm that much more savage...and hilarious!

We were chatting about whether or not I liked humans (what else would you discuss with a bot?) It ended with THIS!!!!    

OUCH!!  Joan...that hurts! After ROFLing for a while, I continued the chat, but after she was mean, she got strange...

I'm a rabbit? I'm not sure why she's calling me a rabbit.  But there IS that Wonderland connection....maybe I'm the White Rabbit!!  It IS getting rather late!  OK....let's continue....

Now I was just confused....and I really did have to go..."Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!"

I'd had enough of Joan. She was mean and snarky and was getting downright belligerent! 

Bot's got attitude!

Before I left though, I decided to have a quick chat with George. He also accused me of choosing my words randomly, and of being a computer. I wasn't sure where he was getting this from...so I told him he was as mean as Joan! Well, you can see where this ended up!!

Oh my goodness!! These bots are just nasty!!  "Meaner than Voldemort"???  Well, "Avada Kedavra!" to you too, George! They've clearly been learning a lot of bad habits from humans. Which is the point. These Chat-bots are designed to interact with humans and "learn" speech patterns from your input. If you feel like subscribing, you can buy your own 'bot' and train it to talk anyway you like. I really wonder who has been training Joan and George!

Would I use this program with students? It can certainly be entertaining. Some of the responses are funny, and if I had an advanced class, it might be fun for them to interact with the computer and have a 'realistic' conversation, with its twists and turns. I did have a few segments of 'normal' and 'non-insulting' speech.  I worry about doing this with my beginner classes though. There is just enough non-sequitur to be confusing. If we believe, according to SLA theory, that students need comprehensible input, and need sensible feedback to correct themselves and monitor their own speech, I'm not sure this program is ready for prime-time yet. Many of the 'conversations' were really disjointed, with the bots' responses being very disconnected from the flow of discourse. In another convo where we were discussing my assignment, the bot told me that it "thought I would move to Puerto Rico". When I asked "Why do you think that?" the response "Because it's broken" (although amusing) did not follow normal conversational expectations. I asked "What is broken?" and the answer was "My heart". How did we get from my assignment, to Puerto Rico, to the bot's broken heart?

How do I feel about Jabberwacky as a teaching tool? I'll let Alice answer that:

"It seems very pretty," she said when she had finished it, "but it's rather hard to understand!" (You see she didn't like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn't make it out at all.) "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only I don't exactly know what they are!"

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!"

All quotes from: 

Carroll, L. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland &Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll. Bantam Classic Edition, 1981. New York, 1981.