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posted by chromas on Thursday April 05 2018, @09:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the forgot-about-Tay dept.

Submitted via IRC for fyngyrz

When people interact with most personal digital assistants or chatbots today, the experience is a lot like speaking into a walkie-talkie or texting: First one party says or writes something, and then the other party digests that information and responds.

It's effective, but Li Zhou, engineer lead for XiaoIce, Microsoft's wildly popular artificial intelligence-powered social chatbot in China, notes that it has one big drawback.

"People don't actually talk that way," Zhou said.

Instead, he notes, when most people are on the phone or chatting in person, they are both talking and listening at the same time – often predicting how the other person might finish a sentence, and maybe interrupting someone when appropriate or breaking an awkward silence to offer a new thought based on the information they are gathering.

Now, Microsoft believes it has created the first technological breakthrough that can allow people to have a conversation with an AI-powered chatbot that is more like that natural experience a person might have when talking on the phone to a friend.

The company recently incorporated these advances into XiaoIce, a social chatbot that has more than 200 million users in Asia, and it is working to apply the same breakthroughs to other social chatbots including Microsoft's Zo in the United States.

Source: https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/xiaoice-full-duplex/


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @10:05AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @10:05AM (#662848)

    What a prettily dressed-up world view.

    Here's what's really happening.

    "People don't actually talk that way," Zhou said.

    Instead, he notes, when most people are on the phone or chatting in person, they are both talking and not listening at the same time – often finishing the other person's sentence for them, and maybe interrupting someone whether appropriate or not or breaking a normal and reasonable silence to offer a new thought based on what just popped into their head, regardless of the actual topic of conversation.

    So they're building a chatbot based on the worst and most empty-headed of human behaviour. What else will they make it do. Laugh like a stuck pig? Detect you're on public transport and turn the speakerphone on for you, and start shouting? Record your conversations and post them to the NSA?

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Thursday April 05 2018, @10:20AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday April 05 2018, @10:20AM (#662851) Journal

    Anything to pass the dumb Turing "test".

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    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @11:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @11:02AM (#662863)

    meta: learn2quote, i.e. you should've removed

    "People don't actually talk that way," Zhou said.
    Instead, he notes,

    Now you're just misrepresenting what he said.

  • (Score: 2) by arslan on Friday April 06 2018, @01:42AM

    by arslan (3462) on Friday April 06 2018, @01:42AM (#663223)

    Yea.. sounds like one of my ex-gf... at least I get coitus for my torture. Thanks, but no thanks.... unless they build this into a fembot, I'd reconsider when I'm 90, deaf and horny.