According to some friends in the gaming industry the companies are going to stop developing PC games as they are cracked and distributed faster than you can buy them in the shops.

As an example they found out that 85 % of the Crysis online gamers used pirate copies.

If you consider the huge efforts that are needed to create a AAA-title and the risk of being copied the PC games will diminuish.

I remember a "sexy" chatterbot in Germany, called red Lola ("die rote Lola").

As the conversation focus was rather narrow (well, flirting and more serious stuff) the lady was rather amusing. Based on the human's questions the fotos were replaced in order to show her current mood.

She even managed to curse and to lead the conversation much better than in an "Eliza" like manner.

Apart from that I still wonder when scientists and technicians realise that avatar and chatterbot communication is doomed to fail. There are about 8 billion communication experts on earth with approximately 50.000 years of evolutionary development of different languages.

The computer linguists did not manage yet to cover a rather simple language like English (well, the grammar of Sanskrit would be easier) let alone more complex languages (Hungarian, German, French ...).

And even if they would manage to cover grammar and syntax the inherent semantic is still unsolved. I remember Doug Lenats ambitious Cyc-Project where they tried to model the knowledge of the Encyclopedia Britannica in a way that a computer could use this knowledge for decision making, analysis and act as basis for communication. To my knowledge the outcome was not that bad but I don't see a "killer application" yet.

Kind regards,
Klaus