The goal for Facebook is to create a chatbot that can have an actual conversation, think ahead, and negotiate.
Facebook researchers say they have made progress in training chatbots to negotiate.
The social networking giant’s Facebook AI Research (FAIR) group published a paper to show how bots can be used to plan ahead in a conversation and adapt negotiation strategies.
Facebook’s overall goal is to create chatbots that can reason, converse, and negotiate so its personal assistant can compete with rivals such as Google (Google Assistant) , Amazon (Alexa) , Apple (Siri) and Microsoft (Cortana) to name just a few.
In a blog post, Facebook noted that chatbots can hold short conversations and carry out simple tasks. But meaningful conversations is a challenge because the chatbot has to combine its knowledge of the world while understanding the conversation.
Facebook, which open sourced its code and published a paper, is hoping the research leads to better negotiations, intelligent compromises and novel sentences. Facebook, which in April rolled out a limited version of its bot, noted:
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Facebook’s chatbot paper lands just as some analysts are questioning whether the company’s AI efforts are actually making it into products. For instance, Edison Investment Research analyst Richard Windsor said in a research note that Facebook’s digital assistant lacks AI in production. Windsor said:
In a nutshell, Facebook’s research team is working toward that do-it-all bot, but it has some work to do.
