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Why chatbots need a big push from deep learning Posted on : Jul 24 - 2017

Most tech giants are investing heavily in both applications and research, hoping to stay ahead of the curve of what many believe to be an inevitable AI-led paradigm shift. At the forefront of this resurgence are the fields of conversational interactions (personal assistants or chatbots) and computer vision and autonomous navigation, which — thanks to advances in hardware, data availability, and revolutionary machine learning techniques — have enjoyed tremendous progress within the span of just a few years. AI advances are turning problems previously thought to lie beyond the realm of what machines could tackle into commodities that are percolating into our everyday life.

Tailing the remarkable growth in popularity enjoyed by AI, a new generation of chatbots has recently flooded the market, and with them the promise of a world where many of our online interactions won’t happen on a website or in an app, but in a conversation. Helping turn this promise into reality is a combination of better user interfaces, the omnipresence of smartphones, and new, state of the art machine learning techniques.

Perhaps one of the main drivers behind this wave of novel AI applications is deep learning, an area of machine learning that, despite existing for roughly 50 years, has recently revolutionized fields such as computer vision and natural language processing (NLP). Nonetheless, despite its incredible performance, deep learning alone is not sufficient to solve the challenges faced by chatbots. Understanding context, disambiguating between subtle differences in language that can lead to wildly different meanings, employing logical reasoning, and most crucially, understanding the preferences and intent of the consumer, are just a few of the many challenging tasks a system must be able to perform in order to sustain conversation with a human.

The ability to answer complex questions using not only context, but also information beyond the confinements of the dialog, is indispensable for building truly powerful chatbots. To answer questions effectively, the bot needs to rely on information that was shared previously in the conversation, or even within other conversations between the bot and the consumer. Moreover, business goals and the intent of the consumer can influence the kind of response the bot will give. View More