Facebook's new system to help computers talk: ParlAI

16 พฤษภาคม 2560

Facebook releases new system to help human assistants or virtual friends learn to talk with you, their master.

AUTOMATION, LIFE & WORK

Facebook's human assistants or virtual friend program

This week Facebook released new software named ParlAI to test and evaluate chatbots (read Facebook press release here).

Chatbots (virtual friends, virtual assistants) are computer programs or apps that have conversations with people in order to help them.

You might say they are robots that provide people with knowledge services.

As robots they potentially compete with, or even replace, workers whose job requires talking with and helping customers, providing information and giving advice to them.

Chatbots are ideally suited for customer service, taking orders or complaints, giving simple advice and perhaps one day, when supplemented by an actual robot with a body, as seen in Japan for example, as hotel or office receptionists.

Every major high-tech firm, including Facebook, is developing chatbots and also, as in this week's software release, software to enable the development of chatbots.

WHAT DOES THE NEW SOFTWARE DO?

The new Facebook software ParlAI has been released under a generous open-source software license to make it widely available to everyone.

The new software allows software developers to train their chatbot program to have conversations in various useful areas such as talking about movies with a human or recommending restaurants in an area, asking and answering questions that a customer has.

In the future, there will also be a public testing ground for chatbots.

Facebook has set up a new competitive environment for software developers in which they can compete to create the best chatbot.

The highest-performing chatbots will be displayed on a leaderboard on the web for at least the community of software developers to see and perhaps even the wider public.

For programmers out there, the new software has many different kinds of objects in it:

"The main concepts (classes) in ParlAI are worlds, agents, and teachers. A world is the environment the speakers live in, and can vary from a simple two-way conversation to more complex scenarios such as a reactive game environment. Agents are things that can act and speak in the world. An agent can be a learner, such as a machine learned system, or a hard-coded bot designed to interact with learners, such as non-player characters in a game. Finally, teachers are a type of agent that talk to the learner, for example, one that implements a task listed previously [question answering, sentence completion or cloze test, goal-oriented dialog, chit-chat dialog, visual dialog]" (see here).

CHATBOTS THAT ALREADY EXIST

There many chatbot programs that are already up and running, helping people such as Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Google's Assistant.

They are all geared towards better understanding what people say and want, and eventually having meaningful conversations with humans.

Simple voice activated automation has been around for awhile.

Amazon's Echo can be asked to play a song you want to listen to or to automatically push all those annoying buttons when you call customer service.

Facebook's Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) group works with the software developers creating Facebook's own chatbot Facebook M.

The Facebook M chatbot (virtual assistant) can be found in Facebook Messenger app and provides location, direction and other useful information.

Many companies such as Nike and Western Union also have chatbots helping customers in Facebook Messenger.

As human assistants, chatbots have tremendous potential to mediates our every interactions with friends, customers, hopefully not family, but certainly to help deal with the huge amounts of info we are bombarded with everyday and have to make sense of.