If you’ve ever been in a job interview and experienced a human resources exec robotically go through a list of preset questions, it will come as little surprise to hear that an artificial intelligence start-up has come up with a new form of bot it says can do the job better.

Westpac owned venture capital fund Reinventure has joined with Singaporean VC Qualgro to provide a $1.5 million seed funding round for Sydney-based Curious Thing, which has developed a new twist on conventional conversational AI.

Whereas most conversational AI, such as Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, will respond to human questions within a predetermined scope, Curious Thing has taken natural language processing in a different direction, designing it to lead conversations and learn through asking questions.

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