Seeking Better Chatbots with Contextual Memory

Another example of looking at memory to establish context understanding for a chatbot

Deploying more conversational chatbots
Startup Posh has created chatbots that use “conversational memory” to have more natural exchanges.

Zach Winn | MIT News Office

The comedian Bill Burr has said he refuses to call into automated customer service lines for fear that, years later on his death bed, all he’ll be able to think about are the moments he wasted dealing with chatbots.

Indeed, the frustrating experience of trying to complete even the most straightforward task through an automated customer service line is enough to make anyone question the purpose of life.

Now the startup Posh is trying to make conversations with chatbots more natural and less maddening. It’s accomplishing this with an artificial intelligence-powered system that uses “conversational memory” to help users complete tasks.

“We noticed bots in general would take what the user said at face value, without connecting the dots of what was said before in the conversation,” says Posh co-founder and CEO Karan Kashyap ’17, SM ’17. “If you think about your conversations with humans, especially in places like banks with tellers or in customer service, what you said in the past is very important, so we focused on making bots more humanlike by giving them the ability to remember historical information in a conversation.”

Posh’s chatbots are currently used by over a dozen credit unions across voice- and text-based channels. The well-defined customer base has allowed the company to train its system on only the most relevant data, improving performance.

The founders plan to gradually partner with companies in other sectors to gather industry-specific data and expand the use of their system without compromising performance. Down the line, Kashyap and Posh co-founder and CTO Matt McEachern ’17, SM ’18 plan to provide their chatbots as a platform for developers to build on.   .... "