NASA Wants Spaceships to Communicate With Astronauts Via Chatbot

Want to see the details of implementation of data integration hwew.

NASA Wants Spaceships to Communicate With Astronauts Via Chatbot

The agency's proprietary program will spot, communicate, and fix errors from space, beginning with the Artemis program’s Lunar Gateway.

By Adrianna Nine June 27, 2023

Chatbots are making their way into other corners of the solar system. As ChatGPT, Bard, and other artificial intelligence-powered chatbots find their way into virtually every industry here on Earth, NASA is considering bringing its own version of the technology aboard spacecraft. The proprietary interface will reportedly facilitate communications with crewmembers, beginning with the Artemis program’s Lunar Gateway.

Dr. Larissa Suzuki, a visiting researcher at NASA, announced the project at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) on Tuesday. The plan is to build a network capable of fielding interplanetary communications while using AI to spot and fix errors as they occur. The program—the name of which has yet to be shared with the public—will effectively work as a virtual repairman, diagnosing errors and inefficiencies and then resolving them (or, at the very least, suggesting potential fixes) when it’s impractical to perform hands-on work. 

NASA intends for the program to be easy to use. Like ChatGPT, space-bound astronauts and crewmembers down on Earth can “talk” with NASA’s program, precluding the need for complicated manuals or tiresome back-and-forth conversations with parties that aren’t directly involved. If NASA can incorporate federated learning—a collaborative approach to training deep learning models—into its interface, it could even have multiple spacecraft share their knowledge, helping the fleet locate important geology or reduce downtime up in space.    ... ' 

Baidu Says it will Integrate Chatbot Ernie Bot into Multiple Products

Latest seen on Baidu's use of AI Chatbots, Baidu seems to be going it alone.  Current accessible versions still only in simplified Chinese.

Baidu to integrate ChatGPT-style Ernie Bot across all operations  in Asia Nikkei

Chinese company sees opportunity as Beijing bans Microsoft-backed bot

Baidu says it will integrate chatbot Ernie Bot into multiple products.   Bans use of ChatGPT

CISSY ZHOU, Nikkei staff writer, February 23, 2023 

HONG KONG -- Chinese search giant Baidu will integrate its ChatGPT-style Ernie Bot across the company's operations after opening it to the public in March, co-founder and CEO Robin Li said Wednesday.

Baidu plans to embed Ernie Bot into its search service first, which the company thinks will attract more users and boost market share "in a profitable manner," Li told analysts in a conference call. Then the company intends to make the bot widely available to its intelligent driving unit and its business partners, and expects "more and more business owners and entrepreneurs" to build their own models and applications on Baidu's AI Cloud.

"Recently, with users raving about ChatGPT, large language models (LLMs) using generative AI have created a mega trend that will revolutionize many businesses," Li said. "Baidu is well positioned to capitalize on the imminent inflection point" in artificial intelligence.

Baidu, along with other Chinese tech companies, announced its upcoming launch of a ChatGPT-style bot this month after Microsoft-backed ChatGPT took the tech world by storm and Google introduced its AI chatbot Bard.

Ernie Bot, which initially may not be a chatbot but rather an embedded feature in Baidu's products, is built on tech the company said has been in development since 2019.

"We have been working on LLM for a few years. We launched Ernie in March 2019, and have scaled it up with well over 100 billion parameters," Li said, adding that it receives training via several billion user search requests and other applications daily. 

Chinese regulators have told domestic companies not to offer ChatGPT service amid growing alarm in Beijing over the AI-powered chatbot's uncensored replies to user queries, and tech companies also will need to report to regulators before they launch their own similar services, Nikkei reported Wednesday.   ... '

China's Baidu's ERNIE Plans to Compete

Have followed Ernie as an assistant style chatbot for some time, and saw chatbot style approaches like 'Ernie' in a visit to China.   Previously mentioned here.    Unclear yet how ERNIE compares to ChatGPT in abilities.  Here just a short overview.  

China’s Baidu reveals generative AI chatbot based on language model bigger than GPT-3  in TheRegister,  Tue 7 Feb 2023  

Probably bilingual bot will be called ERNIE outside China, Wenxin Yiyan within

Chinese web giant Baidu, which has “AI” in its name and has made AI the focus of its hyperscale cloud, has revealed it will launch a generative AI chatbot later this year.

Chinese media reported the launch and Baidu confirmed it to The Register.

“The company plans to complete internal testing in March before making the chatbot available to the public,” a Baidu spokesperson wrote.

The bot will be named “Wenxin Yiyan文心一言” or "ERNIE Bot" in English.

The spokesperson added that the bots are based on the Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration (Ernie) model first proposed in 2019. We were told Ernie “expands into a series of advanced big models that can perform a wide range of tasks, including language understanding, language generation (ERNIE 3.0 Titan), and text-to-image generation (ERNIE-ViLG).”

“What sets ERNIE apart from other language models is its ability to integrate extensive knowledge with massive data, resulting in exceptional understanding and generation capabilities,” the spokesperson added.

Just what the bot will be capable of is not known, but Baidu has over the years described its ambitions for something that sounds an awful lot like ChatGPT. As we noted yesterday, Baidu has discussed "proposed a controllable learning algorithm and a credible learning algorithm to ensure the model can formulate reasonable and coherent texts". It’s done the hard work to deliver such a system, having in 2021 detailed “ERNIE 3.0 Titan” – a pre-training language model with 260 billion parameters.

ChatGPT uses the 175-billion parameter GPT3 model.  ... ' 

AI Lawyers to Appear

More integrated expertise based assistance.   

A.I.-Powered 'Robot Lawyer' Will Appear in a U.S. Court for the First Time

By The Week, January 10, 2023

Consumer-focused tech firm DoNotPay is behind the AI-powered legal assistant.

A chatbot powered by artificial intelligence will appear in court next month to help a defendant fight a traffic ticket, CBS News reports. The "robot lawyer," the first of its kind, is an experimental step toward exploring the capabilities of increasingly sophisticated AI tools. 

Consumer-focused tech firm DoNotPay is behind the AI-powered legal assistant. The company's CEO, Joshua Browder, says the company's creation runs on a smartphone that listens to court arguments. The information is then fed through an AI program that outputs legal arguments to the defendant through wireless headphones in real time.

When asked by Gizmodo if the court would be aware of the AI legal advisor during the hearing, Browder replied, "Definitely not." Phones and internet-powered devices are banned from court proceedings in many countries and jurisdictions globally. To circumvent restrictions, Browder said his company sought out a court that allowed Apple Airpods for hearing accessibility, per Gizmodo.

From The Week

Chula Chatbot

ACM CAREERS

Chula Chatbot Serves As an Education and Career Coach

By Chulalongkorn University, September 26, 2022

A chatbot developed by lecturers at Chulalongkorn University is designed to serve as an education and career coach for learners and students.

The EmpowerMe chatbot "is like having a student counselor or personal coach who can offer advice on how to develop career skills in the digital age so that students can find the job for which they are well suited," says Professor Jintavee Khlaisang. It will also suggest lessons to help a user develop the types of skills needed in a particular career. It assesses a learner's performance and motivates them with rewards in the form of medals.  

The application received a gold medal award from the 2021 Seoul International Invention Fair. It has been patented for user-interface design.

From Chulalongkorn University

View Full Article   

Chula Chatbot Career Coach

Interesting, especially regards to how much a coach it can be. 

Chula Chatbot Serves As an Education and Career Coach

By Chulalongkorn University, September 26, 2022

A chatbot developed by lecturers at Chulalongkorn University is designed to serve as an education and career coach for learners and students.

The EmpowerMe chatbot "is like having a student counselor or personal coach who can offer advice on how to develop career skills in the digital age so that students can find the job for which they are well suited," says Professor Jintavee Khlaisang. It will also suggest lessons to help a user develop the types of skills needed in a particular career. It assesses a learner's performance and motivates them with rewards in the form of medals.  

The application received a gold medal award from the 2021 Seoul International Invention Fair. It has been patented for user-interface design.

From Chulalongkorn University    (Korea) 

View Full Article   

More on No-Code

Yes will continue to emerge, and decrease security

 No-Code' Brings the Power of AI to the Masses

The New York Times,Craig S. Smith, March 15, 2022

"Citizen developers" are tapping products that allow anyone to use artificial intelligence (AI) without writing any computer code, as part of the "no-code" movement envisioned by advocates as revolutionary. "We are trying to take AI and make it ridiculously easy," said Craig Wisneski at the startup Akkio, which lets anyone make predictions using data. No-code platforms replace coding languages with simple and familiar Web interfaces, and new startups are making the power of AI available to nontechnical people in visual, textual, and audio spheres. The Juji tool, for example, is engineered to simplify chatbot building, by using machine learning to automatically manage complex conversation flows and deduce user characteristics to personalize each engagement. The power of no-code platforms is also growing through AI innovations such as OpenAI's GPT-3 system, which can write code when prompted with simple English.

Full Article.

Scaling up Chatbots

 Below just the introduction, much more at the link.

Scaling Up Chatbots for Corporate Service Delivery Systems  By Alistair Barros, Renuka Sindhgatta, Alireza Nili   Communications of the ACM, August 2021, Vol. 64 No. 8, Pages 88-97 10.1145/3446912

Conversational agents, or chatbots, providing question-answer assistance on smart devices, have proliferated in recent years and are poised to transform online customer services of corporate sectors.1,6 Implemented through dialogue management systems, chatbots converse through voice-based and textual dialogue, and harness natural language processing and artificial intelligence to recognize requests, provide responses, and predict user behavior.5,28 Market analysts concur on current adoption trends and the magnitude of growth and impact of chatbots anticipated in the next five years. According to a report by Grand View Research, for instance, already 45% of users prefer chatbots as the primary point of communications for customer service enquiries, translating into a global 'chatbot' market of $1.23 billion by 2025, at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.3%.9   .... '

Chatbot explains Apps

Intriguing idea.  Could a similar means explain potential security issues with an App or system?  Or its uses in context.  I like the idea of explanatory analyses available for complex systems.  Could have used them to deliver alongside systems we delivered to decision makers.

Chatbot Can Explain Apps, Show How They Access Hardware or Data  By Aalto University (Finland)

Researchers at Finland's Aalto University, the University of Luxembourg, and Germany's University of Bayreuth developed a chatbot that can help designers and developers create new apps and explain apps to end-users.

Hey GUI (Graphical User Interface) answers questions with images, screenshots, and simple text phrases.

Aalto's Kashyap Todi said, "Hey GUI eliminates the need for coding skills or technical expertise. Anyone can use it to search for information on, for example, which one of my apps is asking for permission to use the camera, or where is the search button on this screen."

The researchers surveyed more than 100 people to determine the most desirable chatbot features, and how users preferred to interact with chatbots.

Said Todi, "This is an important first step towards developing chatbots that can help users find information about apps using

From Aalto University (Finland)

View Full Article  

Robot Therapy

Seems stretched, but the name especially is cute, reminds me of some similar approaches demonstrated to us in Japan.

Something Bothering You? Tell It to Woebot.

The New York Times, Karen Brown, June 1, 2021

A chatbot application offered by Woebot Health uses the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to counsel patients via natural language processing and learned responses. Many mental health experts think CBT's structure and focus on fostering skills to change negative behaviors lends itself to algorithmic deployment to some extent. The Woebot app can emulate conversation, recall past sessions, and provide advice on sleep, anxiety, and stress. Woebot Health founder Alison Darcy said a well-designed bot can bond with users in an empathetic and therapeutic manner. Although Woebot does not approach actual therapy, the company is pursuing U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance to extend the app to help treat postpartum and adolescent depression.  ... " 

Doing Simple Chatbots

Close to the kind of thing we did simply in the 90s.  In the Alexa Blog:

How to Create a Chatbot With No Coding Experience in 4 Simple Steps  By Lydia Roth

If you really want to drive customer engagement, learning how to create a chatbot is a great place to start.

According to Dmitriy Kachin, COO of Chatfuel, strong chatbot experiences with higher audience engagement register 80–90% response rates. This result shows that users are willing to use chatbots, but the experience still needs to be properly executed to meet their needs.

Building a chatbot completely from scratch using custom code takes a lot of time and resources that many businesses simply don’t have. Lucky for you, we’ve broken down a step-by-step process for quickly and cost-effectively building a chatbot — no coding experience necessary.

Step 1: Define the Goal of Your Chatbot

Before you actually start building your chatbot, you need to set a clearly defined goal for it. The type of chatbot you build will depend on what you want it to accomplish.

Goal Example 1: Handle a Portion of Incoming Customer Support Questions

Want to make life a little easier for your hardworking support staff? Use a chatbot to resolve simple inquiries so your staff can focus on more complex issues that require extra attention and detail.

Use a chatbot to resolve simple inquiries so your staff can focus on more complex issues that require extra attention and detail.   ...  " 

Using VisiRule to Create Chatbots

Had been looking for an easy way to create chatbots that include FAQ's. Recalled a company called  VisiRule that supported rule-based expert systems.  Decision tree style chatbots.    We looked at them some time ago.    Below are some examples of their work, with a number of chatbot examples.  VisiRule has been mentioned many times in this blog, see their tag below.

ChatBot Demos

This page contains various ChatBot demos which have been automatically generated from a VisiRule chart. This allows authors to quickly draw the intended conversation structure visually and easily. In addition, common questions can be answered by attaching a FAQ KB in the form of question/response. VisiRule contains a NLU component to help match user input text to these known questions. The combination of a structured decision tree flowchart conversation with general purpose information retrieval makes for a more rounded and holistic user experience.  ... "

Chatbots Chatting

Now seen this a number of times, never very impressive.

AI News  What happens when Google’s chatty bot chats with a chatbot?

Google Duplex impressed and scared the world in equal parts when it was unveiled, and now we’ve seen how a conversation goes with another chatbot.

Duplex, for a quick primer, is Google’s AI-powered voice bot which can call businesses on a person’s behalf for things such as booking hair appointments. It’s so realistic that everyone has decided that bots must declare themselves as such before chatting with a human.

A company known as PolyAI – which specialises in “enterprise-ready voice assistants” – has posted an account of what happened when Duplex called one of its restaurant assistants.

Duplex was calling businesses over the summer to update opening hours on Google Maps. This is how the conversation went:    ... " 

Microsoft Spins off Chinese Chatbot

Somewhat surprising, the demos I had seen looked interesting.

Microsoft Spins Off Chinese Chatbot Xiaoice  by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 14, 2020
Microsoft is spinning off its AI-based chatbot technology, Xiaoice, into a stand-alone company after nurturing it for about six years.

It is aimed at Chinese consumers and has the personality of a teenage girl. Microsoft will retain a stake in the new company, Xiaoice or Xiaobing, and will license technologies from Microsoft for future efforts in research and development.

The chatbot became available to consumers in China in 2014, but now the service is available across many social networks, with about 660 million users, and offers more than 280 skills.

"Morning News," a Chinese live program in 2015, introduced Xiaoice as a trainee anchor where it took charge of the daily weather report.  ... " 

Facebook's Blenderbot

 Good indication of what Facebook has been doing in this space..  From O'Reilly: 

Facebook open-sources BlenderBot
Facebook AI has open-sourced BlenderBot, an open domain chatbot. It’s said to “feel more human,” because it blends a diverse set of conversational skills—including empathy, knowledge, and personality—together in one system. The model has 9.4 billion parameters, which is 3.6 times more than the largest existing system. Here’s the complete model, code, and evaluation setup.  

Facebook Blender Chatbot Does Open Source

Anything that can make a chatbot more conversational, and have the ability to use and update context
continually is good. 

Facebook releases its 'Blender' chatbot as an open-source project
It could help tomorrow's AI converse more naturally with people

Andrew Tarantola, @terrortola in Engadget

The virtual assistants that inhabit our smartphones are helpful, sure, but they’re not going to pass the Turing test any time soon. They’re designed for understanding specific commands and actions like checking on restaurant reservations or getting updates on the weather, rather than, say, carrying on an in-depth conversation with a human. But chatbots could soon become far more loquacious thanks to Facebook, which this morning released a startlingly lifelike chatbot that it’s been developing, dubbed Blender, as an open-source resource for AI research.

Facebook has been pouring money and resources into its Natural Language Processing technologies for a few years now and those efforts appear to have paid off. The company claims that Blender is the single largest open-source chatbot created to date. It’s been trained on a whopping 9.4 billion parameters -- nearly 4x as many as Google’s Meena and more than 10x as many as the previous largest OS chatbot available on the internet.

“One of the recent findings in the area of NLP, and AI in general, has been that as you scale, as these neural network models larger and larger, they tend to perform better,” Stephen Roller, a research engineer at Facebook’s AI lab (FAIR), told Engadget. “We had a number of issues when we were trying to train this thing. When you start to get that large, these things no longer are able to fit on a single GPU anymore.”  .... "

See more on their Blended Talk Ability.

Is Your Chatbot Engaging?

Well yes, at least as it contributes to some goal.  If I want a question answered quickly and accurately it requires a certain level of engagement, for example enough to get the details of the question across.  If my Goal is to learn some about some topic, the engagement is different and likely more complex.  Defining a measure is a good idea.

That Chatbot May Be Chatty, but Is It Engaging?
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
By Rishbha Bhagi

University of Southern California (USC) researchers have developed a technique for evaluating chatbots' conversational skills, grading their responses on an engagement scale of 0 to 1 based on the concept that open-domain dialogue systems must be genuinely interesting to the user, not just relevant. Sarik Ghazarian in USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering Information Sciences Institute said understanding this assessment will help improve chatbots and other open-domain dialogue systems. Said USC Viterbi's Nanyun Peng, "We can use [this work] as a development tool to easily automatically evaluate our systems with low cost. Also, we can explore integrating this evaluation score as feedback into the generation process via reinforcement learning to improve the dialogue system." ... '

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.   .... "

Facial Expressions Don't Tell Whole Story

Blatantly Obvious,  which we explored in a number of cases.  It can be one input into may vectors,  it may tell only a very minor part of the story, or none at all.  It can lead to categorizing useful behavior for kinds of goals.  We worked with various approaches like 'expression glasses' to work with varying context understanding.   Including chatbot interactions.  Note also the whole large amount of work in understanding 'neural' activity.

Facial expressions don't tell the whole story of emotion
by Laura Arenschield, The Ohio State University

Interacting with other people is almost always a game of reading cues and volleying back. We think a smile conveys happiness, so we offer a smile in return. We think a frown shows sadness, and maybe we attempt to cheer that person up.

Some businesses are even working on technology to determine customer satisfaction through facial expressions.

But facial expressions might not be reliable indicators of emotion, research indicates. In fact, it might be more accurate to say we should never trust a person's face, new research suggests.

"The question we really asked is: 'Can we truly detect emotion from facial articulations?'" said Aleix Martinez, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at The Ohio State University.   ... "

Looking at the Google Meena Chatbot

Just pointed to this, the claims are considerable.  A very good conversational model would be a big step forward.  Current assistants do poorly except for the simplest requests.  I want assistants to be to not only consider context of a question, but to also expand that context during conversation.  Thats a big step towards 'general intelligence'.    Will be examining this.   Comments out there from people that have?   More to follow.

Just how big a deal is Google’s new Meena chatbot model?
By Ronald Ashri, Greenshot labs,  @Ronald_IStos in Venturebeat

Technology behemoths like Google and Facebook have got us used to, even fatigued by, their never-ending string of impressive announcements of progress in the AI field. Nevertheless, when Google announced that it has built a “conversational agent that can chat about… anything,” even the most jaded amongst us had to pay attention.

Since I work in the field, helping organizations build conversational solutions, I was particularly intrigued. One of the biggest challenges for bots is to handle the infinite possible phrases that a user might say and respond appropriately. A bot that can chat about anything seems like just the thing we would need to solve this challenge. So the question becomes, exactly what impact Google’s new bot, called Meena, will have on organizations looking to deploy conversational AI applications. Have we found the holy grail? Will our bots finally stop saying “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite understand that”? Well, the short answer is that no, we are not quite there yet. Nevertheless, Meena is incredibly impressive and represents a fascinating attempt to solve the problem. In the next few paragraphs, I will summarize what Google did and how this might impact conversational AI in the days, months, and years to come.   .... "