The chronicles tell that the first chatbot was designed in 1966 by the scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, who in his article Computational Linguistics had explained the steps to create a Eliza, one of the first chatbots in history.
Written for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Weizenbaum’s paper did not foresee an evolution of virtual assistants beyond the scientific realm. Imagining a world in which talking to intelligent automatons was an everyday thing was a field only tackled by science fiction cinema.
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Half a century later, virtual assistants are increasingly present in our communication ecosystem. And this is how, in the heat of the growth of chatbots, our interaction with robots has become daily. But we are not only referring to humanoid automatons like C3PO, the remembered golden android from Star Wars, but to others that swarm through our multiple devices such as cell phones, smart speakers, game consoles, and even in the incipient metaverse.
Virtual assistance already had its way in the United States and Europe, driven by the new habits of interaction between humans and machines that brought the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence. But the abrupt immersion of people in virtuality, after the coronavirus pandemic, boosted its use in companies and public organizations around the world.
In Latin America, these platforms gained unprecedented momentum through the public sector: in Peru and Mexico, assistants were created to inform citizens of the 2021 electoral processes; Meanwhile, in the City of Buenos Aires, the chatbot of the Buenos Aires Government marked a course to follow in the region after its integration with WhatsApp.
The growing craft of training chatbots
The Markets & Markets site estimated that by 2026 the world market for “AI conversation”, which encompasses all virtual assistance interfaces using Artificial Intelligence, will grow to $18.4 billion.
This optimistic scenario poses an interesting challenge for digital communication: How to teach machines to talk to people? The answer lies in Natural Language Processing, an area of Artificial Intelligence that aims for bots to carry out dialogues as similar as possible to those that humans have with each other. But it is not easy.
It is that, for a machine, understanding a language is not just looking up the meaning of words in a dictionary. There are many terms or expressions that, taken out of context, they can even mean their opposite. This distinction, which is very easy for a person to make, is more difficult for a chatbot: with all the Artificial Intelligence in tow, the most advanced virtual assistants still can’t do without humans to carry out their tasks and, perhaps, never become independent.
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Not bad news, after all. Contrary to the neo-Luddite predictions of the Information Society, the digital conversation job market increasingly recruits more experts in linguistics, communication and even dramatic arts to design and train the dialogues that virtual assistants will have with their potential users. Its function? From thinking about the “personality” and the character that the bot will have, to creating the architecture of the possible conversation flows. Training thus involves detecting whether the “attempts” to dialogue with the user make sense and, eventually, correcting them.
In short, chatbots, digital conversation and this trend that strives to teach machines to speak are forging new and thriving tradeschildren of this era of Artificial Intelligence that, in the ’60s, was only imagined in science fiction movies.
Source: zyri.net
