The trend towards “voice first” is gaining momentum. Mary Meeker’s recently published 2017 Internet Trends shows that 20% of mobile search queries were made using voice in 2016. The growing success of Amazon’s Alexa-enabled devices and the rush by Google, Apple, and Microsoft to make up ground are all well-documented.

Individual people, as they search, shop or otherwise carry out digital commerce are increasingly likely to engage with brands using natural language, whether via voice or text input. Brands, correspondingly are offering up intelligent assistants that dialog’ with their customers and prospetcs.

Now Facebook and Amazon are leading efforts to make conversational interactions with artificially intelligent automated assistants more natural and seamless.

Facebook recently announced their ParlAI (pronounced “parlay”) platform for dialog research. It is aimed at academics pursuing research into the construction of truly conversational systems. As much fun as it can be to text with a chatbot or ask Alexa about the weather, today’s voice assistants and chatbots are lacking in many basic conversational skills. ParlAI is a platform where researchers can access and share tools and data to overcome these deficiencies. Facebook strives to build agents that accel at question answering, sentence completion, goal oriented dialog, chit chat dialog, and visual dialog.

Intelligent assistants equipped with these advanced skills would be able to assist consumers in completing complex tasks, such as discussing and booking travel arrangements or selecting and purchasing products. They would also be able to engage in human-like chit chat that isn’t necessarily goal-oriented, but that engages the consumer in a meaningful and satisfying way.

In a similar move, Amazon is offering a $2.5 Million Alexa Prize to advance conversational artificial intelligence. The competition is limited to 12 universities. The goal of the competition is to create a “socialbot” that can engage with humans on popular topics for 20 minutes. The first batch of these socialbots is available now. Use any Alexa-enabled device and say “Alexa, let’s chat.” Alexa will randomly choose one of the competitor’s socialbots and the bot will engage you in conversation.

I gave some of the competing socialbots a try. This first generation of socialbot seems far less engaging than your average text-based chatbot. For example, the chatbots entered into the Loebner Prize each year (most of which are powered by the sheer force of thousands of possible inputs and matching outputs and not by AI) are far superior to any of the Alexa Prize entrants.

But Amazon is funding research into conversational AI and where the money goes, the talent is sure to follow. We can expect ParlAI and the Alexa Prize to bear fruit in the coming years. The voice first socialbots that are boring today may be wildly engaging in just another year or two. That’s when conversational commerce will become the norm. It might be time for brands to start thinking about what sort of conversationalists their chatbots of the future will be.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles, Mobile + Location

Tags: Facebook, Amazon, AI, intelligent Assistants, ParlAI, conversational