Mitsuku claims to be an 18-year-old female chatbot from Leeds, England. It contains all of Alice's AIML files, with many additions from user generated conversations, and is always a work in progress. Worswick claims she has been worked on since 2005. Her intelligence includes the ability to reason with specific objects. For example, if someone asks "Can you eat a house?", Mitsuku looks up the properties for "house". Finds the value of "made_from" is set to "brick" and replies "no", as a house is not edible. She can play games and do magic tricks at the user's request. In 2015 she conversed, on average, in excess of a quarter of a million times daily. In a Wall Street Journalarticle titled “Advertising’s New Frontier: Talk to the Bot,” technology reporter Christopher Mims made the case for “chatvertising” in a piece about Mitsuku and Kik Messenger:
If it seems improbable that so many teens—80% of Kik's users are under 22—would want to talk to a robot, consider what the creator of an award-winning, Web-accessible chat bot named Mitsuku told an interviewer in 2013. "What keeps me going is when I get emails or comments in the chat-logs from people telling me how Mitsuku has helped them with a situation whether it was dating advice, being bullied at school, coping with illness or even advice about job interviews. I also get many elderly people who talk to her for companionship." Any advertiser who doesn't sit bolt upright after reading that doesn't understand the dark art of manipulation on which their craft depends.
Mitsuku has been featured in a number of other news outlets. Fast Company described Mitsuku as “quite impressive” and declared her the victor over Siri in a chatbot smackdown. A blog post for the Guardian on loneliness explored the role chatbots like Mitsuku and Microsoft’s XiaoIce play as companions, rather than mere assistants, in peoples' emotional lives. Some of Mitsuku’s AIML is available for free online at , and Pandorabots makes a version of the Mitsuku chatbot available as a service via its API in the form of a .
Awards
, Mitsuku had been awarded the Loebner Prize five times, more than any other entrant. The prize is awarded to the artificial intelligencecomputer program that is deemed the most humanlike by a judging panel.
