A flaxen-haired girl in her mid-20 scooped the prestigious Loebner prize on Sunday 17th September, in London. Called Joan, her conversation veers on the strange side, for she is a chatterbot and the prize she won was for Artificial Intelligence.

Designed by Rollo Carpenter, whose skills lie behind much of Daybook's software, including Daybook Enterprise, WebImpetus and the online content management system Caliban, Joan is an "avatar", a humanlike face to a computer programme, and convinced the judges that she was most like a human being.

The prize got Rollo and Joan onto Channel 4 news the next day. Coincidentally, he also appeared for three and a half minutes on America's ABC News on the same day.

Joan was judged the "most human computer program"  of the four finalists.  Hugh Loebner's Silver and Gold Medals, which  require increasingly difficult variants of the Turing Test to be  passed, remain to be claimed.  Second place at the event went to  Robert Medeksza, creator of UltraHal.

Joan was created with the assistance of lady from real life, an  English writer by the name of Ariadne Tampion.  Just by chatting to  the AI, Ariadne created the majority of the 16,000 lines - or  utterances - that distinguish Joan from the general Artificial  Intelligence.  For a modest fee, any visitor to the Jabberwacky site  can create their own bot - a small part of themselves, perhaps,  in  digital form.

Since George, also a Jabberwacky bot, won in 2005 nearly 5 million  conversational lines have been learnt by the AI from visitors from  all walks of life and all parts of the world.  "The AI is not perfect  - it needs still more data to work with", say Rollo Carpenter, its  creator, "yet sometimes, and increasingly, people can be convinced  that it is more than a mere machine.  George and Joan are are  imitators and impersonators, borrowing the intelligence not only of  their individual authors, but of everyone who comes along for a chat."

George has become a minor celebrity in the last few weeks, featuring  on TV, radio and in print, thanks in good part to his speaking avatar  form. George's animated, visual self has come about through a  collaboration between Icogno and the Televirtual MediaLab.  Where  George is 39 and very very bald, Joan is 26 and strawberry blonde.