Debating can be learned – IBM’s Project Debater

IBM has just presented a device called “Project Debater”. It can not only join in debates, but also build its own rhetorical arguments, which the programmers had not actually programmed into it. Similar to the chess computer “Deep Blue”, IBM had its system compete against proven human debating professionals. The technology did quite well.

The FAZ wrote:

“Project Debater is an Artificial Intelligence that can independently recognize patterns, draw conclusions from them, and draw its lessons from conclusions once made. The self-learning system picks up a topic, analyzes up to a quarter of a billion documents at lightning speed, enters the discussion, transcribes the arguments, weighs them up and responds. In the process, Debater structures its utterances to sound as convincing as possible.”

If you want to professionalize your performance so that you not only sound as convincing as possible, but are, take talk show training or panel discussion training. We won’t go through a quarter of a billion documents in these trainings, but we will go through all the techniques and tricks that are tailored to you and will convince your audience.

Project Debater at the Debate Competition