Peter Luh¹ and Alan Wilhelm², ¹Retired Physicist, USA, ²CTO @ Referential.ai, USA

AI chatbots promise indispensability, yet no standard measures this quality beyond innovation or ethics. Inspired by Samuel Johnson's quip, "I'm lost without my Boswell," often attributed via Holmes to Watson, we propose the Boswell Test, a framework assessing AI companions' indispensability through mentor-level expertise and intimate user insight. Our initial test, probing complex AI policy queries, reveals strengths in knowledge delivery (such as U.S., China) but gaps in personalization (such as EU's broad ethics, India's scale focus). We automate such queries via multiple chatbots with cross-assessment of grading each other's responses. Automation easily extends to multiple domains. True indispensability where users feel "lost without my chatbot," however, requires understanding the human host, an elusive frontier for today's AI, constrained by data and algorithmic limits.

Boswell Test, Boswell Quotient, Chatbot, Indispensability, Turing Test