Tuesday, August 20, 2019

What Is Conversational AI?

For a quality conversation between a human and a machine, responses have to be quick, intelligent and natural-sounding. But up to now, developers of language-processing neural networks that power real-time speech applications have faced an unfortunate trade-off: Be quick and you sacrifice the quality of the response; craft an intelligent response and you’re too slow.

That’s because human conversation is incredibly complex. Every statement builds on shared context and previous interactions. From inside jokes to cultural references and wordplay, humans speak in highly nuanced ways without skipping a beat. Each response follows the last, almost instantly. Friends anticipate what the other will say before words even get uttered.