Facebook Teaching Chatbots to Talk

In the age of technology and mobile phones, people seek for faster and better services that they can get by just one click. So, companies and brands are trying out new techniques to make their services smoother and less time-consuming. Telephonic or human-oriented customer services can be confusing and time demanding. This is where modern day game changer, ‘Chatbots’ are introduced.

Chatbots are tech-enabled assistants that serve as customer servers for quick and straightforward responses. This enables to save time and concentrate on other demands.  The use of chatbots in the last couple of year has enhanced the support system at a quick pace.

Meanwhile, debates have been going on saying that whether this chatbots technology is here to stay and is it reliable? As the bot technology is dynamic and constantly changing, many alterations have been done since the mid-2000s. Still, there are efforts been taken to figure out the way to improvise chatbot’s Natural Language Understanding (NLU).

Twitter was first to try business to consumer messaging (B2C), then Facebook, Amazon and Apple followed the same. Though there is one main problem with chatbots as they only respond by using canned phrases and most times doesn't even know what you actually said or asked.

Facebook took a step to fix it. To make chatbots more engaging and realistic, they have turned to deep learning. This means that instead of setting up programmed questions and answers, chatbots are taught to look for patterns in datasets and try to mimic a real person, by tracking or knowing its family or hobbies that will help it to get almost the actual meaning of the question that person is asking.

And this is how you will get AI that can speak relatively fluently. But as Facebook tested these new AI systems they found out that it is fluent but still very sketchy and mechanical. So far this has got some good results, there is still a long and challenging way to go that will involve a lot of changes to be made in AI. Despite, all this Facebook hasn’t given up on chatbots and practices are still going on to make it real.

Authored By: Anushka Singh