More on Google Meena Chatbot: Making Contextual Sense

More on the recently announced Google chatbot.  As I have said before, we often see intelligence in our day to day world as a conversation.   Person to person, person to machine,  person to assistant, even person to document.  We have adjust to different expectations based on  'who' is communicating.    But there is also the matter of context, if its not well understood the apparent intelligence can be poor.   Consider 'making sense' to be a primary measure of achieving a conversational goal.    Making sense, common or otherwise, needs a firm contextual basis.  Evidence here:

Artificial intelligence: Does another huge language model prove anything?  By Ben Dickson in Techtalks

This article is part of our reviews of AI research papers, a series of posts that explore the latest findings in artificial intelligence.

This week, Google introduced Meena, a chatbot that can “chat about… anything.” Meena is the latest of many efforts by large tech companies trying to solve one of the toughest challenges of artificial intelligence: language.

“Current open-domain chatbots have a critical flaw — they often don’t make sense. They sometimes say things that are inconsistent with what has been said so far, or lack common sense and basic knowledge about the world,” Google’s researcher wrote in a blog post.

They’re right. Making sense of language and engaging in conversations is one of the most complicated functions of the human brain. Until now, most efforts to create AI that can understand language, engage in meaningful conversations, and generate coherent excerpts of text have yielded poor-to-modest results.  .... " 

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.   .... "