(2017-04-14) Facebook Built The Perfect Chatbot But Cant Give It To You

Facebook built the perfect ChatBot but can’t give it to you yet. Facebook’s assistant, named M, is the smartest of the bunch.

Instead of just retrieving simple pieces of information from databases, M can understand complex orders and take actions like booking theater tickets or contacting companies for information. M is so smart because it cheats

a human being invisibly takes over, responding to your request as if the algorithms were still at the helm.

a kind of semi-public R&D project.

“The learning rate, the growth of the automation—we’ve seen that it would be slower than we hoped.”

Making a chatbot that helps you by getting things done, not just acting as a sounding board or confessor, is much harder.

Alexandre Lebrun built M because he had spent more than a decade building conventional, narrow chatbots and dreamed of offering much more. He joined Facebook in early 2015 when the social network acquired Wit.ai, a company he cofounded

Facebook’s artificial-intelligence research group used M to test a new type of learning software called a Memory Network... a design Google is also testing.

They now kick in if someone asks M to get flowers delivered, for example, automatically using key info from the request

Other discoveries have been less cheering. One is the huge appetite M unlocks in its users. With limited, fully automated assistants like Siri or Alexa, people tend to settle into using a few functions they find to work reliably. With M, they don’t.

after a while they ask M to organize their wedding

A technique called Deep Learning has recently made Machine Learning more powerful (memory networks are an example).

Laurent Landowski, who joined Facebook with Lebrun as cofounder of Wit.ai and now oversees M. (Lebrun returned to his native France in January, joining Facebook’s AI research lab in Paris.