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    Facebook tries giving chatbots a consistent personality

    by 
    Jon Fingas
    Jon Fingas
    01.28.2018

    Dig into the personalities of chat bots and you'll find that they're about as shallow as they were in the days of Eliza or Dr. Sbaitso. They respond with canned phrases and tend to be blithely unaware of what you've said. Facebook wants to fix that. Its research team has tested a new approach that gives bots more consistent personalities and more natural responses. Facebook taught its AI to look for patterns in a special 164,000-utterance data set, Persona-Chat, that included a handful of facts about a given bot's persona. An AI trying to mimic a real person would have five biographical statements to work with, such as its family and hobbies, with each of them revised to say the same things in a different way. Train existing chat bots from that and you get AI that 'knows' what it likes, but still maintains the context of a conversation and speaks relatively fluently.