Hey, so you know all those chat bot projects in Second Life, some pretty wacky and crippled, some which are well-built enough to mess around with? Writing for Wired, Clive Thompson notes that they helped drive research in the new generation of chat bots:
“Chitchat is a basic human need,” says Harry Shum, head of Microsoft Technology and Research. It greases the wheels of the workplace. When you ask a colleague to do something, you don’t just bark out an order; you banter for a while. Shum thinks these pleasantries—what linguists call “phatic” communications, like “How ya doin’?”—will help bots integrate into the flow of daily life.
Some research backs this up. When Doron Friedman, head of the Advanced Reality Lab at IDC Herzliya, looked at how users in Second Life interacted with a bot, he found that phatic communications were the second-most-common parts of the conversation (after facts). Another study found that people prefer bots with “personality.” The “junk” DNA is more important, as it were.
Messaging apps like Slack, What's App, and Facebook Messenger have become massive in recent years, which has built up a demand for more intelligent, more human-seeming chat bots:
You can see this tendency in Slack, the hit messaging system. Programmers often create and share “slackbots” to manage simple tasks like organizing meetings or submitting expense receipts. (You tell the bot, “Hey, I spent $34.23 at a lunch today with our client,” and it squirts the info into the invoicing database.) Sean Rose, a product manager at Slack, thinks this conversational quality is why slackbots are becoming popular. “In many cases, it’s easier and more fluid to work with a bot that sounds like a human,” Rose says... Slack users often spend hours composing wisecracking retorts into their slackbots to surprise their colleagues.
These aren't avatar-based bots, strictly existing in chat, but as they get better, it's likely we'll see their chat algorithms transplanted into the conversational systems MMO bots as well. Read Clive's whole article here.
Please share this post:
Comments