Ray Kurzeil's Google Team Is Building Intelligent Chatbots (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes an article from The Verge. Inventor Ray Kurzweil made his name as a pioneer in technology that helped machines understand human language, both written and spoken. In a video from a recent Singularity conference Kurzweil says he and his team at Google are building a chatbot, and that it will be released sometime later this year... "My team, among other things, is working on chatbots. We expect to release some chatbots you can talk to later this year."

One of the bots will be named Danielle, and according to Kurzweil, it will draw on dialog from a character named Danielle, who appears in a novel he wrote -- a book titled, what else, Danielle... He said that anyone will be able to create their own unique chatbot by feeding it a large sample of your writing, for example by letting it ingest your blog. This would allow the bot to adopt your "style, personality, and ideas."
Kurzweil also predicted that we won't see AIs with full "human-level" language abilities until 2029, "But you'll be able to have interesting conversations before that."

Comments

Dead people

[bigdavex]

I think it would be pretty interesting to feed the writing of a dead person into a program and then talk to it. I'm sure people would pay to chat with their late grandmother. But also, what does George Washington think about Middle East policy?

I'm skeptical of the article's claims but this is at least a good science fiction idea.

Re:Kurzeil, inventor ?

[Anonymous Coward]

However, google for "Ray Kurzeil invention" and such and I don't find any inventions of his.

From Wikipedia:

Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first charge-coupled device flatbed scanner,[2] the first omni-font optical character recognition,[2] the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind,[3] the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer,[4] the Kurzweil K250 music synthesizer capable of simulating the sound of the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

Arguably not up there with the printing press or the airplane, but I do wager he's done more than you, other-AC calling him "hot air and wind", have accomplished.

Chatbots are godawful

[Anonymous Coward]

I've yet to see a chatbot that does anything much deeper than look at the single previous line.
Every asshat writes a chatbot and says "It's different this time" and then it's not different. It's the same old shit. No lesson is being learned.

Part of it is simply that you and a chatbot fundamentally have almost nothing to talk about.
The chatbot has no information of use to you*. You have no information of use to it**.
The chatbot cannot perform any physical work that would benefit you since it has no physical presence.
You cannot perform any physical work that would benefit it, since it has no goals.

*It could tell you a story or read you Wikipedia page or something, but you'd be better off skipping the middleman.
**unless it is trying to harvest personal data from you for advertising etc.

AI based on text

[mugnyte]

To me the crux comes down to the experiential history any consciousness has as a reference in a conversation. If you remove any one of our senses from a person, and then try to have a conversation in text, there are noticeable differences. For a chatbot, remove all senses but some strange "can see text in an otherwise silent dark experience" and a chatbot is at a severe handicap to participate. Contextual clues aren't just the decorative influence to meaningful dialog, they're the essence of it.

So until we get a "bot" that can use some form of vision, hearing and touch - and possibly smell/taste - to fills its "memory" with massive associations that we humans use - it'll never do much. We're left with a machine guessing at the layers of meanings involved and following massive piles of rules to mimic the text of real communication. It cannot easily make the jumps across semantic concepts of jokes like "How does a fish smell? With it's nose, dummy!" or phrases as simple as "See what I mean?" or "I heard you were taking a vacation" or "Check out this vid, it touches on the finer point about AI" or "Over here, the weather is great" - the list is endless, and subtly woven into all conversations.

Interestingly, a machine that could use input like our own senses wouldn't need to be limited to just those 5. It could have broader-bandwidth input for light, sound, and get into perceiving radio-waves, echolocation, etc. Of course, it would have to talk to us in "human context" so it understood time-related phrase like "a little while" was based on human perception, the locale, etc. Also, we may have to get used to a single bot that has multiple physical presences, such that it "lived" (had sensory input from) in several locations across the globe experiencing things, but knew to focus on our location when chatting with us.

What some have proposed is a precursor to such a machine, by using machine-aided design to build the bot. So for example if a computer could design the optimal "drivers" for stereoscopic vision (layers of them - for color, contrast, movement, etc) through iterative evolutionary means (where multiple designs for, say, contrast, competed with a fitness test) - we might get a machine accepting input from devices and storing/searching it more effectively. Right now, we throw a lot of guesses around and just employ massive processing power. Of course, this iterative design would need to be built into the bot permanently, so that it kept improving without so much tinkering.