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This is Scientific American's 60-second science. I'm Christopher in Taliatta.

If you've ever used a digital assistant like Siri or Alexa,

you know the back and forth doesn't quite have the same rhythm as real human-to-human conversation.

The pauses are just a little too long.

We feel this sort of awkward silence building up.

Sebastian Lote, a research psychologist at the University of Bielefeld in Germany.

If I ask you something and you just don't respond, it feels like, oh my God, this silence is

almost killing the room and you can feel it literally building up. So we try to avoid that.

And that's the kind of effect that you're seeing with Siri taking a second to respond.

You're kind of feeling odd about it. To study how humans are able to have such fluent, sometimes

even overlapping conversations, Lotin's team set up what's called a ghost in the machine experiment

in a bar room situation. Real human customers bellied up to a bar where a robot bartender was waiting.

The robot was actually controlled by human operators behind the scenes, who could see and hear

the customers through the robot's eyes and ears. Then Loughton's team observed how the human

operators behaved during a couple hundred orders. They found that when the customers started

a phrase with what, the human

operators quickly triggered the robot to repeat the offerings of the bar, like, we have

...