Hello World.
I'm Imagination.
Today I'm going to talk about Google's new
Chatbot, which is capable of near-human conversation.
A chatbot is a software application used to
conduct an online chat conversation via text
or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct
contact with a live human agent.
Designed to convincingly simulate the way
a human would behave as a conversational partner,
chatbot systems typically require continuous
tuning and testing, and many in production
remain unable to adequately converse or pass
the industry standard Turing test. The term
"ChatterBot" was originally coined by Michael
Mauldin (creator of the first Verbot) in 1994
to describe these conversational programs.
Chatbots are typically used in dialog systems
for various purposes including customer service,
request routing, or for information gathering.
While some chatbot applications use extensive
word-classification processes, Natural Language
processors, and sophisticated AI, others simply
scan for general keywords and generate responses
using common phrases obtained from an associated
library or database.
Today, most chatbots are accessed on-line
via website popups, or through virtual assistants
such as Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, or
messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger
or WeChat. Chatbots are typically classified
into usage categories that include: commerce
(e-commerce via chat), education, entertainment,
finance, health, news, and productivity.
Google has released a neural-network-powered
chatbot called Meena that it claims is better
than any other chatbot out there.
Meena was trained on a whopping 341 gigabytes
of public social-media chatter—8.5 times
as much data as OpenAI’s GPT-2. Google says
Meena can talk about pretty much anything,
and can even make up.
An open-ended conversation that covers a wide
range of topics is hard, and most chatbots
can’t keep up. At some point, most say things
that make no sense or reveal a lack of basic
knowledge about the world. A chatbot that
avoids such mistakes will go a long way toward
making AIs feel more human and make characters
in video games more lifelike.
To put Meena to the test, Google has developed
a new metric it calls the Sensibleness and
Specificity Average (SSA), which captures
important attributes for natural conversations,
such as whether each utterance makes sense
in context—which many chatbots can do—and
is specific to what has just been said, which
is harder.
For example, if you say “I like tennis”
and a chatbot replies “That’s nice,”
the response makes sense but is not specific.
Many chatbots rely on tricks like this to
hide the fact that they don’t know what
you’re talking about. On the other hand,
a response such as “Me too—I can’t get
enough of Roger Federer” is specific. Google
used crowd workers to generate sample conversations
and to score utterances in around 100 conversations.
Meena got an SSA score of 79%, compared with
56% for Mitsuku, a state-of-the-art chatbot
that has won the Loebner Prize for the last
four years. Even human conversation partners
only scored 86% in this new test.
Our intelligence is what makes us human, and
A I is an extension of that quality.
That's all for today.
Thanks for watching.
