Facebook’s experimental chatbot is learning to do small talk

A chatbot trained to engage its partner on personal topics can learn to predict information about the other participant.

Background: Even with AI, chatbots are brittle systems that typically can’t talk about anything outside of what they’ve been trained on. They also tend not to have a personality or long-term memory, so most development for chat agents is around task-specific goals, like airline bookings.

Once more, with feeling: A new paper by Facebook AI Research demonstrates a way to create a bot that is good at general conversation, a.k.a. chit chat. Trained on a new data set consisting of 164,356 utterances between crowdsourced workers who were asked to chat, the system can store a persona in a memory-augmented neural network and produce “more personal, specific, consistent and engaging responses.”