If your answer to any of these questions is "yes," you may enjoy Dr. Abuse or Kas 2001, two readily available programs that let you hold a Spanish-language conversation with your computer. Both operate with recent versions of Windows and are set up something like most chat room software, where you can type in your comments and then press the Enter key and wait for a response.

One of the main goals of the early developers of artificial intelligence was to write a program that would be good enough at mimicking human conversation so that a user might be fooled into thinking he was conversing with a live human. Both of these programs, a rarity in that they use Spanish rather than English, succeed — to a point, and certainly more successfully than do most language translation programs, which are another form of artificial intelligence. They often do well in responding to a complete statement or question, but they do poorly at remembering the context of statements. Even so, they can be quite amusing, and it wouldn't be unfair to say that they often do a decent job of mimicking an eccentric. Dr. Abuse, who takes on the role of a doctor (when asked what kind of doctor, he replies that he's a master of many things), seems to be the more intelligent of the two.

Following is a recent conversation I had with Dr. Abuse (original on the left, translation on the right; my parts of the conversation are in blue and preceded by an angle bracket). Even a brief conversation such as this one can give you an idea of his strengths and limitations. (By the way, he once told me that with a body like his he must be male, so that's how I'm referring to him, but another time he avoided answering.)

According to the help files, both programs can demonstrate the ability to learn, and the makers of Kas 2001 invite users to submit files for expanding its knowledge base. Both can be set up to use with voice recognition and reproduction software.

Both Kas 2001 and Dr. Abuse can be downloaded and used without charge, although paid registration of Dr. Abuse is requested. Minimal Spanish knowledge is needed to install the files, especially for those who have experience in installing downloaded software. Enjoy!