There have been games with NPCs smarter than that. There have been <i>text adventures</i> with sentence understanding at that level. It's a cute demo, but calling it a "living and conversing agent" is way too much.<p>"Mario, exit the game." "Do you really want to exit the game?" So not impressed.<p>On the speech front, there is now an automated telemarketing agent which is about as smart as most script-driven human telemarketers. That's a somewhat scary development.
This is a shrimp treadmill if I ever saw one. [1]<p>[1] <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2014/11/13/how-a-47-shrimp-treadmill-became-a-3-million-political-plaything/" rel="nofollow">http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2014/11/13/how-a-47-...</a>