Facebook close to building chat bots with true negotiation skills
Facebook close to building chat bots with true
negotiation skills
BY JAMES WALKER JUN 15, 2017
Facebook is getting closer to building chatbots that are
capable of planning conversations and negotiating with humans in a realistic
way. By training the bots to mimic human responses, Facebook claims they can
then make decisions on their own.
The company posted details of the project in a recent
publicly available research paper. As Recode reports, the company presented
chatbots with conversations between real people in which the participants
negotiated to come to a conclusion. After "learning" how to negotiate
by studying their human teachers, the bots were tested to see if they had
mastered the skill.
Facebook tasked the chatbots with working with a
"partner" to divide up several objects, each of which was correlated
to a different numerical points value. The bots had to negotiate to work out
the best way to divide the objects and accumulate the highest possible number
of points.
After running the experiment several times, the bots
reportedly managed to convince human participants they were negotiating with
another person. While the evidence isn't entirely conclusive, Facebook said it
shows the bots "learned to hold fluent conversations" around their
subject matter. Since none of the observed behaviour was directly programmed by
the researchers, its presence suggests the bots learned how to negotiate from
the humans.
The breakthrough has significant implications for the
future of chatbot development. Bots have repeatedly been held up by tech
companies as a keystone of the AI-dominated future. Platforms such as
Facebook's own within Messenger are seeing considerable growth. With over
100,000 developers now registered, it's clear bots are appealing to many in the
industry, even if consumers are typically less enthusiastic.
For all the hype around chatbots, most have fallen flat
so far though. Many of the supposedly most useful ones, such as those to let
you order food or book movie tickets, aren't particularly helpful. They tend to
follow basic conditional logic, responding to your queries with a preformulated
response based on what you wrote. The experience is lacklustre and can be
slower than navigating to the website and placing the order yourself, with
saved card details.
Bots that can negotiate could transform this. With
enhanced planning and decision capabilities, the templated control flow could
be replaced with dynamic on-the-fly actions. The AI could decide on a path
forward on your behalf, enabling developers to create more flexible
interactions.
This kind of technology is still a considerable way off though.
While the development is important, Facebook conceded that the example is just
one negotiation interaction out of millions a bot may need to handle. It also
said the bots weren't consistently able to outwit humans and it's yet to
ascertain whether the skills are transferable to another scenario. There's a
lot of work to do, but Facebook's dream of a bot-based future just got a bit
closer to reality.
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