Facebook developed a bot that mimics human facial reactions

Facebook's artificial intelligence lab has developed an animated bot capable of mimicking human responses to conversation by training it using footage from hours of Skype conversations, per New Scientist.

• One big problem: AI's biggest hurdle has been the uncanny valley, a state in which robots read to humans as almost realistic but still undeniably artificial.
• Facebook's researchers plotted 68 different facial reactions that take place during a conversation into the bot, which eventually learned the "correct" ways to respond to conversational cues. Volunteers judged the bot and a human to be equally natural during conversation.
• Why it matters: The bot is only still approximating — through repeated machine learning — what it thinks a conversational response should be, rather than holding a genuine conversation. Science still has a long way to go until such technologies can develop their own personalities or be tailored to response to specific situations.