A Japanese company claims to have invented the world’s first artificial intelligence “chat robots” designed specifically to converse with English language students.

The online characters – dubbed “chatbots” – employ high-speed speech recognition technology enabling them to conduct real time spoken conversations directly with students.

The concept of an online “chatbot” – a computer simulation of an intelligent conversation – has also become steadily popular in recent years, perhaps fuelled in part by the growing appeal of virtual communication among solitary internet users.

See: Telegraph.co.uk