> Modern conversational agents (chatbots) tend to be highly specialized
Name a one chatbot?
I've never seen one other than a lame chose-your own adventure style path.
I feel like the emperor has no clothes.
Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything
101–108 of 108 posts
Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything
#102This is more of a deepfake for text chat than any kind of useful tool.
That said, it's still pretty cool how far you can get with just trying to context match a reply based on previously recorded conversations. It's obviously not far from being able to fool a human at a quick glance, whatever the use cases are. Perhaps an updated Lenny[1]?
Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything
#103I spoke with a blind woman this week who loves talking with her smart speaker, Alexa. "She's quite a character." I imagine that some lonely people might get comfort talking to their house plants, so a smart speaker that can actually talk back, however limited, would be a great improvement. So a chatbot can be useful even if zany at times. The big issue is how user expectations are set up. I'll put up with a digital assistant trying its best to help process my query with much more tolerance than a chatbot trying to pretend it is a human. Researchers are trying to narrow the gap between these two. But for now I will enjoy the former and be annoyed by the later.
Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything
#104Easy way to test: Human: "take the last letter of orange and name any animal that begins with that letter" Or: Human: "pick any number from 1 to five, multiply it by two, and say any word with that number of letters"
Is your test supposed to work on real humans too? :o) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzDlS6JPUtE
Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything
#105what’s the practical use of this model? For example, can I assign some domain knowledge or some area of specialty to the bot, so that it can be a question answer machine. Or I basically can’t control its reaction?
Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
You definitely need a model of the world, but you probably don't want to be constructing it during speech. What you want is a generative model that you've trained on the simulation data ahead of time so you can quickly make inferences once deployed.
How would that make a conversation more lifelike? It'll still be a limited model of the world, unless somehow you intend to give it the entire breadth of human experience, and will still fall to the same shortcomings as every chatbot, ask it about something it doesn't know and it'll try and fit a response that gives it away as a bot, act confused in a way that gives it away as a bot or just say something nonsensical.…
Kind of an open problem on how to make a generative model which is sufficiently powerful :)
But that is basically what humans do - we don't run internal simulations, we have a model we've trained over a lifetime of experiences with the world that judges the likelihood of a given scenario
Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything
#107> My favorite show is Star Trek. What does it mean when a chatbot says that? Does it mean that it was fed a bunch of shows and this one resonated (computed)? Or is it a filler until you ask it a question it can help with?
Possibly this is the most occurring theme in its training dataset text.
Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
>very small children spending a lot of their time learning basic concepts of cause and effect, properties of objects, materials and physics and so on. i do not believe that young children explicitly/consciously simulate in their minds to learn cause and effect and other things, though this might be up for debate
Who said anything about "consciously"? It doesn't need to be conscious to affect the conversation.
as to whether it is conscious or not influences whether you would want to model it a-la 3d physics engine, or if not then perhaps there is a more elegant solution we do not know of yet