Earlier quoted context omitted.
All these speech assistants are almost stateless, aren't they? I mean, they can ask you questions and go into a listen-for-an-answer state, but, at least last time I tried, you can't have a conversation about your conversation with them and improve their comprehension of anything. It's like talking to a command line, or those old Palm Pilots you had to learn a special alphabet to scribble on. It's quite interesting t…
When i made a meeting room reservation chatbot the hardest part was managing a conversational context without the user getting stuck. In the end I had a “draft booking” and a conversation loop, where the bot would repeatedly ask to fill in missing parts (eg nr of participants) and then give you a summary and opportunity to correct things. It was hard to do, and definitely required a lot of contextual understanding of…
Wanna have the simplest parser? Finite State Automaton to the rescue! So people automatically assume that a the simplest approach yo conversation is also something like a finite state machine.
Here's the thing. The only reasonable FSA would be a clique.
You can always move between nodes.
A much more feasible approach is the "actions competing for repelevance" one. Where you have global state manipulated by actions, and all the actions generate a "appiccability score" for the given user input. The system then chooses the most appropriate action, and it does it's thing. And on the next user input the cycle repeats.