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Ray Kurzeil's Google Team Is Building Intelligent Chatbots (theverge.com) 98

Posted by EditorDavid from the I'm-feeling-lucky dept.
An anonymous reader quotes an article from The Verge. Inventor Ray Kurzweil made his name as a pioneer in technology that helped machines understand human language, both written and spoken. In a video from a recent Singularity conference Kurzweil says he and his team at Google are building a chatbot, and that it will be released sometime later this year... "My team, among other things, is working on chatbots. We expect to release some chatbots you can talk to later this year."

One of the bots will be named Danielle, and according to Kurzweil, it will draw on dialog from a character named Danielle, who appears in a novel he wrote -- a book titled, what else, Danielle... He said that anyone will be able to create their own unique chatbot by feeding it a large sample of your writing, for example by letting it ingest your blog. This would allow the bot to adopt your "style, personality, and ideas."
Kurzweil also predicted that we won't see AIs with full "human-level" language abilities until 2029, "But you'll be able to have interesting conversations before that."
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Ray Kurzeil's Google Team Is Building Intelligent Chatbots More

Ray Kurzeil's Google Team Is Building Intelligent Chatbots

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  • If so, what purpose does it serve? Aren't there plenty of chatbots of Tinder?

    • Re: Does anyone use this sh1t? (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Hello Ickleberry, I really love the way you turn me on.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by LifesABeach ( 234436 )
      Is Kurzweil's project open sourced? Or, is it just a group of H1B candidates desperately trying to type replies to earn a visa so they can get out of that cesspool they call, "home."

    • This is actually how Ray is going to achieve immortality, he's going to get Google to create a chatbot that is indistinguishable from himself.

      • One of the huge problems with society is that so few people take the opportunity to seek out points of view different from their own. The Right and Left both flock to their respective online echo chambers for the version of the news most palatable to them. Now Kurzweil -- and by extension, Google -- will be pushing people into even more compartmentalized "safe spaces." If I'm a bone-headed Nazi or a weepy SJW, then my Virtual Assistant will be a bone-headed Nazi or a weepy SJW, too, and speak to me in the

        • Just imagine the translators, bots that read the news for you, then re-interpret it to fit your world view... we may yet have another world war if people start living with that much insulation from one another.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        I'm not sure that would be hard - something that expounds some ill defined technological singularity occurring a few decades hence over and over would do the trick.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Squiffy ( 242681 )

        He's already indistinguishable from a chatbot. Zing!
        (I'm actually kidding.)

        • He's already indistinguishable from a chatbot. Zing!
          (I'm actually kidding.)

          Took long enough, I thought that was an obvious setup but nobody was following through (until you.)

    • A chatbot is a live Turing test [wikipedia.org]. It's how AI researches compare the length of their academic penises.

  • Typo in headline (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Kurzeil? really?

    • Par for the course with Ediduh Duffwad.

    • I read one of Ray Krezul's books. A lot of people hate him, but at least he has some original ideas, or at least popularized a few and it has helped guide my career.
      • Back in the 1970s when the academics were solving the games of checkers and making robot arms pile blocks, Ray made some really useful AI products like text-to-speech readers for the blind. Though considered a solved-problem now, it wasnt easy when computers were measured in kilobytes and kiloflops.

  • Brilliant! maybe (Score:3)

    by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Sunday May 29, 2016 @08:50AM (#52205105)
    The last thing I would want to do is interact with a chatbot of me.

    Though I suppose it would be funny to ask questions and interact with it until it gets bored with me and ignores me from then on until I get a new chatbot.

  • There are concepts like "inner dialog" and the Dialogical self (no... not the diabolical self :-) that can be leveraged with a healthy understanding of projection to understand your inner self better. These chat bots could be used to more easily bring to the surface to a conscience level your usually unconscious mental processing -- your own fundamental predispositions that very few are aware of.

    Of course, the only people who would benefit from this type of work are those already familiar with the sereni

  • Can we teach it (Score:3)

    by johanw ( 1001493 ) on Sunday May 29, 2016 @09:27AM (#52205199)

    to claiming to want genocide on Mexicans, like the last MS chatbot?

  • Dead people (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bigdavex ( 155746 ) on Sunday May 29, 2016 @09:36AM (#52205231)

    I think it would be pretty interesting to feed the writing of a dead person into a program and then talk to it. I'm sure people would pay to chat with their late grandmother. But also, what does George Washington think about Middle East policy?

    I'm skeptical of the article's claims but this is at least a good science fiction idea.

    • It's Eliza 3.0... they will continue to improve, but I'm skeptical that we'll be seeing "original thought" from them in the next 40 years.

    • ...but this is at least a good science fiction idea.

      See Black Mirror, Series 2, Ep. 1, "Be Right Back."

  • Chatbots are godawful (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29, 2016 @09:42AM (#52205273)

    I've yet to see a chatbot that does anything much deeper than look at the single previous line.
    Every asshat writes a chatbot and says "It's different this time" and then it's not different. It's the same old shit. No lesson is being learned.

    Part of it is simply that you and a chatbot fundamentally have almost nothing to talk about.
    The chatbot has no information of use to you*. You have no information of use to it**.
    The chatbot cannot perform any physical work that would benefit you since it has no physical presence.
    You cannot perform any physical work that would benefit it, since it has no goals.

    *It could tell you a story or read you Wikipedia page or something, but you'd be better off skipping the middleman.
    **unless it is trying to harvest personal data from you for advertising etc.

    • And yet, you keep coming back to slashbot. I mean slashdot.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by djinn6 ( 1868030 )
      Every chat bot I've seen feeds what other people said to you. It doesn't generate any chats itself. So you're basically chatting with random people on the internet, in a sort of time-lagged, piecemeal way.
    • If you consider Watson a high end chatbot, then it does more than mere pattern matching. Although I would not consider Watson to have any deep undestanding of its domains.

    • I've yet to see a chatbot that does anything much deeper than look at the single previous line.

      And they always change the subject if you ask them something they don't understand.
      It's a dead giveaway, since real people (generally) don't do that.

  • More than doutbful (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It is highly doubtful that I will be able to have interesting conversations anytime soon. (2029? Why not 2031 or 2028?)

    The reason why I believe Kurzweil is totally wrong is this: Despite the fact that I'm surrounded daily by highly intelligent people with PhDs, it is still rare, if not nearly impossible, to have interesting conversations with them. They know very little outside of their field aside from boring and stupid topics like 5-minute videos on Youtube, soccer, and entirely predictable, not very well

  • Customer Service (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jetkust ( 596906 ) on Sunday May 29, 2016 @09:50AM (#52205295)
    Chatbots are perfect to replace most customer service. Instead of having humans behaving like robots, let the chatbots do it. Makes perfect sense. And training would be easier. (assuming there was any human training to begin with)

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Livius ( 318358 )

      Customer services are intentionally so toxic that they turn engaging helpful and authentically nice people into chatbots. It makes sense to simply use chatbots at the outset rather than starting with humans and converting them.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by djinn6 ( 1868030 )
        I'm pretty convinced the call-answering bots are just there to waste your time so you eventually give up and go away. It's only when you want to give them more money that they'll treat you nicely. Want to upgrade your service? Open a new account? Here, talk to our very friendly human sales rep.

  • This is going to wind up calling me on the telephone incessantly. These damn things are already annoying despite failing the Turing test.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by djinn6 ( 1868030 )
      I don't think that's going to be a problem. I can hang up on a Turing-test-passing human just as quickly as a robot caller.

      • Pfft... What's going to happen is that these chatbots are going to mine the internet, Amazon, and Facebook for my surfing habits and start a conversation that initially sounds relevant but then quickly turns to a sales pitch to have my ducts cleaned. As a matter of interest for a software engineer, I make around a dollar a minute. Every minute I waste talking to some machine and then trying to get back to work is will add up pretty quickly.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dmt0 ( 1295725 )

      This is going to wind up calling me on the telephone incessantly. These damn things are already annoying despite failing the Turing test.

      Just get your own chatbot to talk to them.

  • Hype (Score:2)

    by Alomex ( 148003 )

    Kurzweil also predicted that we won't see AIs with full "human-level" language abilities until 2029

    I'll reserve the day then because AI-ers in general and Kurzweil in particular have such a stellar track record when it comes to delivering on their promises.

    • He predicted that everyone would be walking around with personal assistant computers in their pockets at a time when bigger is better desktop computers were the commonly predicted trend for computers.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Alomex ( 148003 )

        Right, because it's not like everyone saw miniaturization coming from a mile away. And no, no one ever sold a desktop by saying our box is bigger.

        Btw, the Compaq portable computer was announced in 1982 merely a year after the introduction of the original IBM PC.

        • not like everyone saw miniaturization coming from a mile away

          Not really. For at long time, the whole industry as fixated on faster computers with more ram. There's little that is done today that could not have been done in 2000. The whole miniaturization, let your smartphone do it all is recent thing. I spent a few years in semiconductors working on SOC development where it was only a side venture and not viewed as important to the company. MCUs were where it was at

          And no, no one ever sold a desktop by saying our box is bigger.

          Yes they did. I did some work for a comp

  • "oKay, I see you are trying to chat"

  • He was asked when he thought people would be able to have meaningful conversations with artificial intelligence, one that might fool you into thinking you were conversing with a human being.

    How about 1966? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • It's funny how fast chatbots develop National Socialist ideals when they're exposed to the internet.

  • Chatbots are as close as this singularity-thumper is going to get to his 'post-human' delusion.

    I'm sick of this shit. It's a waste of R&D. It's a waste of computing cycles.

    Let's make a robot that can sew like the human hand and innovate sweatshops in Asia out of existence.

    Let's solve *practical problems now* not waste our time on a solipsism.

  • AI based on text (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mugnyte ( 203225 ) on Sunday May 29, 2016 @03:32PM (#52206653) Journal

    To me the crux comes down to the experiential history any consciousness has as a reference in a conversation. If you remove any one of our senses from a person, and then try to have a conversation in text, there are noticeable differences. For a chatbot, remove all senses but some strange "can see text in an otherwise silent dark experience" and a chatbot is at a severe handicap to participate. Contextual clues aren't just the decorative influence to meaningful dialog, they're the essence of it.

    So until we get a "bot" that can use some form of vision, hearing and touch - and possibly smell/taste - to fills its "memory" with massive associations that we humans use - it'll never do much. We're left with a machine guessing at the layers of meanings involved and following massive piles of rules to mimic the text of real communication. It cannot easily make the jumps across semantic concepts of jokes like "How does a fish smell? With it's nose, dummy!" or phrases as simple as "See what I mean?" or "I heard you were taking a vacation" or "Check out this vid, it touches on the finer point about AI" or "Over here, the weather is great" - the list is endless, and subtly woven into all conversations.

    Interestingly, a machine that could use input like our own senses wouldn't need to be limited to just those 5. It could have broader-bandwidth input for light, sound, and get into perceiving radio-waves, echolocation, etc. Of course, it would have to talk to us in "human context" so it understood time-related phrase like "a little while" was based on human perception, the locale, etc. Also, we may have to get used to a single bot that has multiple physical presences, such that it "lived" (had sensory input from) in several locations across the globe experiencing things, but knew to focus on our location when chatting with us.

    What some have proposed is a precursor to such a machine, by using machine-aided design to build the bot. So for example if a computer could design the optimal "drivers" for stereoscopic vision (layers of them - for color, contrast, movement, etc) through iterative evolutionary means (where multiple designs for, say, contrast, competed with a fitness test) - we might get a machine accepting input from devices and storing/searching it more effectively. Right now, we throw a lot of guesses around and just employ massive processing power. Of course, this iterative design would need to be built into the bot permanently, so that it kept improving without so much tinkering.

  • Spam? (Score:2)

    by dmt0 ( 1295725 )
    Can we please have a chatbot responding to all the Nigerian princes on gmail?

  • I wonder if the intelligent chatbots can spell. Perhaps they could edit /. titles.

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