Chatbots and Virtual Assistants - How can we improve?

In my final year at Nottingham Trent University I had a module on Natural Language Processing (NLP) where we studied and made a report for recommendations on chatbots. I did extensive reading at the time around the history of chatbots including some reading of Joseph Weizenbaum.

I was struck by a review of one of his books by Stanford Professor, Joshua Lederberg who said:

http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/BBBBLN.pdf

The quote itself is from 1979 and there hasn't been much change in all that time. There has been some improvements on virtual assistants but not so much on chatbots.

During my NLP assignment I saw that there were 3 main points that could improve the overall quality of chatbots and virtual assistants:

• Storing of user information to get the name, location and age of the user
• Being able to interpret multiple ways of getting the same information i.e. "I'm called X", "My name is X", "I'm X", "I was christened X"
• Being able to decipher when the user is purposely being random in order to confuse the chatbot

For my final year assignment I went on to create a small project that was an expert chatbot with a knowledge of films, in this project I tried to affect change in three other points that I found existing chatbots couldn't handle:

• Giving 100% accurate responses
• Having actual context
• Be able to handle multiple contextual pieces in interactions

Since I left university there's been huge strides in this field with Watson and AWS services being able to loosely retain some context and be able to handle multiple interactions. Even the responses can be 100% accurate for their specific field. i.e. saying "That's not relevant, ask me a question about X". 

Both are now able to get a user to "login" and thus get their name and potentially age from their profile, and they can use location services to get the area where the user is. They are able to "learn" from their previous conversations to decipher different ways of asking the same questions and can be "taught" alternative forms of the same question. 

More and more they are being created with personas and have the ability to inject a piece of humanism into dialogue in this way either through wit, or through personifying a brand. For example, imagine a Captain Morgan Spice assistant that punctuates sentences with an "argh", "matey" or some for of seaman pun.

There are some key points that still need to improve both in the chatbot and virtual assistants space.

To clarify my position when I talk about chatbots and virtual assistants:

Chatbot: A program that is able to talk to any person about any subject at any time.

Virtual Assistant: A program that emulates a conversation with a sales representative or help desk in order to provide specific information about a specific subject i.e. Films, Cinema, Cars, Trains. 

Virtual Assistants follow a decision path asking questions to guide you to either purchase a product or get information within their knowledge base. They can lead a person along and will seem more intelligent because they are proactive in getting you from A to B.

Chatbots have to be able to handle almost anything that anyone can say at any given time, and act as though they are a human interacting with another human. This is difficult because people are unpredictable, people will try their best to break a system and it is hard to emulate the full workings of the human brain. 

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Virtual Assistant Improvements:

• User Information: It is no longer enough to just know a users name and location when acting as a virtual assistant. VA's need to be able to remember your previous interactions, what things you like and what things you don't like. If i was your PA and i knew you didn't like getting up before 6am at any circumstance, why would I suggest you get the 6:10am train to London?

• Yes / No: Whilst it is bad form for a VA to reply with yes or no answers, they should universally be able to decipher that a "yes" or "no" response is in direct correlation to a question they just asked. This is where context comes into it. Any chatbot or VA should be able to keep a conversation going by retaining context of the last few sentences, otherwise you have a programmed script reader.

• Conversation Stream Ranking: Virtual Assistants should be ranking their entire conversation flow and altering the projects end point (three, four or five) interactions downstream.

Chatbot Improvements: 

• Intelligent Learning: Chatbots need to learn from human interaction, but to do some wholesale or in bites is not the correct way to progress.  Chatbots need a way of being able to decipher whether a user is speaking nonsense - either maliciously or not. This might mean integrating with services like google.

• Creating Experiences: With each conversation that they have, chatbots are having an "experience". They need to be able to draw on these experiences on future conversations. If most of it's conversations are about Harry Potter, then its probably a Harry Potter fan and can mould itself to have some opinion one way or another which it can use in future conversations. i.e. "Before we get too close, you need to know I'm a Hufflepuff and I'm proud of it!"

Joint Improvements:

• Short Term Memory: In my Final Year project I dealt with short term contextual memory by retaining the last said Name to replace; him, her, she, he and they with the said name to add context to the statement i.e. "My brother is called Bill" "That's nice, tell me about him" "He likes football" (Bill likes football), this can be applied to objects, films and locations. 

• Exploring Understanding: Giving some form of response, even if the chatbot does not understand to try and illicit understanding. Asking leading questions based on a potential conversation stream. i.e. "I hate them" "What do you hate?" "I hate trains" "That's rubbish, you're always taking trains so that can't be fun!"

• Relationships: When human beings talk they are constantly building relationships with the person they are talking to which will be different for each person. One person might like talking about gardening which wouldn't work with another person. Each person has different sense of humour, others are more driven by different goals. Its important that both chatbots and virtual assistants are able to create these personal relationships.

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So these are some of the things I think we should be heading towards. 

 - Do any existing products already do this?

 - Know how we can achieve these functions? 

 - Disagree with anything I've said?

 - Want to ask a question about my uni projects?

Feel free to leave a comment below! or email me here :)