Motivating example – AI-powered communications

Meet Arty, our AI chat system that is able to handle and respond to incoming customer support requests, just as any of our human employees would. Arty is endowed with the knowledge of our company and is ready to go at a moment’s notice.

Here is how a sample dialogue between a human and an AI customer support system would transpire:

Human	AI
Hello, my phone is broken.	Sorry to hear that, how is it broken?
It’s frozen and I can’t reset it.	What kind of phone is it?
The new iDroid 28	Ahh, I see. Hold the power and volume down button for 20 seconds and it should reset.
It worked, thanks!	No problem, have a great day.

 

The reason that these types of systems are exciting and are disrupting major markets is the simplicity of such a complicated system. Let us break it down. On the surface, you might think, what an easy problem! The person has a simple problem with a simple solution. A request comes in and a response comes out. Hello, my phone froze, what should I do? Easy, just reset it. And sure, on the surface, that is what is happening here:

from Arty import AI
AI.respond_to("my phone froze, what should I do?")
>> "reset it."

The tough part comes in when you look at it from the AI’s perspective. It hasn’t had the entire human experience that we have had. It hasn’t had the privilege to read The Illiad or even Clifford the Big Red Dog and learn to internalize their messages. The point is, the AI hasn’t had a lot of experience in reading things. This AI has probably been given a few hundred thousand (maybe even millions) of previous chat dialogues of people in the past and was told to figure it out.

The following is a sample of data given to our AI system based on previous chat logs:

Request	Response
Helllo	Hi, what seems to be the problem?
My phone doesn’t work!!!!	Oh noo!!!! What’s going on with it?
>Hold on, I have to go walk my dog. BRB.	OK. I will wait.
Hey.	Hello. My name is Mark, how can I help?

 

The data is organized into two columns where the Request column represents what the end user types into a chat support dialogue. The next column, Response, represents the customer support agent’s response to the incoming message.

While reading over the thousands of typos, angry messages, and disconnected chats, the AI starts to think that it has this customer support thing down. Once this happens, the humans set the AI loose on new chats coming in. The humans, not realizing their mistake, start to notice that the AI hasn’t fully gotten the hang of this yet. The AI can’t seem to recognize even simple messages and keeps returning nonsensical responses. It’s easy to think that the AI just needs more time or more data, but these solutions are just band-aids to the bigger problem, and often do not even solve the issue in the first place.

The underlying problem is likely that the data given to the AI in the form of raw text wasn’t good enough and the AI wasn’t able to pick up on the nuances of the English language. For example, some of the problems would likely include:

• Typos artificially expand the AI’s vocabulary without cause. Helllo and hello are two different words that are not related to each other.
• Synonyms mean nothing to the AI. Words such as hello and hey have no similarity and therefore make the problem artificially harder.