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The emphasis, of course, is on “relatively.” Sample conversations from Facebook’s study showed that the bots were much more consistent and fluent than bots trained on movie phrases, but they definitely wouldn’t pass a Turing test. Testers added that the bots weren’t as engaging, although The Verge speculates that this may have stemmed from the limited number of factoids. Real people often have much more than five things to say about themselves, so the well of conversation may have run dry much earlier with the bots than it does with humans.
This is a research project, so it’s not certain if or when the lessons learned here will apply to real-world chatbots or other conversational AI systems. However, it’s hard to imagine Facebook ignoring what it learned here. Many AI helpers, whether they’re bots or voice assistants, tend to have either no personality at all or one defined only by cute stock phrases. This would at least flesh them out and give them more to talk about than the weather or your latest purchase.
