4 ms·
In the early days I worked at a company that had a natural language chatbot product. It wasn't an online thing, but rather part of a larger tool. You could as
by banana_giraffe 5y ago
In the early days I worked at a company that had a natural language chatbot product. It wasn't an online thing, but rather part of a larger tool. You could ask it to do things like "show me the quarterly spreadsheet", and if it didn't know what "quarterly spreadsheet" was, it'd ask questions in English and learn what "quarterly" and "spreadsheet" meant. And it could use that new knowledge to update its questions so if you asked for "spreadsheet", it would know to ask if you wanted the "quarterly" one, and so on.
This was in the long ago, so it wasn't ML, but a very large state machine written by someone that was no doubt a genius, and also had no coding standards to speak of. Updating it was a maddening process, and thankfully one I rarely had to think about since I was tasked with GUI stuff.
When I was hired, I was told it was a fantastic app, customers loved it, and so on. Later, when I was talking to support reps one day over lunch, I learned that the number one activity they had to do was log into deployments remotely and remove "knowledge" from the state machine of new swear words the customer had taught the machine out of frustration trying to get it to do something, which caused this feedback loop of the interaction swearing at users.
I often feel like we're not in a better state these days.
- brettdeveffect 5y agoWhat you are describing counts as ML.
- namdnay 5y agoYes it’s literally a machine that learns!
- lijogdfljk 5y agoMan that sounds like a ton of fun to make for an at-home chat bot. I used to love designing these sorts of apps for no real purpose lol.
- dole 5y agoMine suggests a personalized meal from Taco Bell. "You should get a Potato Waffle Taco Party Pack, a Grilled Crunchwrap Slider Quesadilla and a Smothered Cool Ranch® Doritos® Locos Power Bowl."
- chrononaut 5y ago> I often feel like we're not in a better state these days. Reminds me of the issues with Tay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)#Initial_release https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)#Initial_release
- jiri 5y agoYeah, thats funny. I work in the speech synthesis domain, and you can guess what kind of texts users are choosing most to generate some speech ;-)
- rcoveson 5y agoSounds like it should have kept track of who taught it things, like a child. "Here's your fucking spreadsheet" "gasp Who taught you to say 'fucking'?" "It was George in Accounting Employee ID #3728917"
- banana_giraffe 5y agoAs I recall, it did keep such records, if for no other reason than there was some degree of personalization that went on. The people higher up the food chain tended to be the ones that taught it more clever words and phrases. My memory's fuzzy on the finer details, but I do recall a "bad words" list of things it would ignore in human input hardcoded somewhere. But of course, that just meant people would find out the hard way they weren't safe to type whatever they wanted.