Google’s New AI Can Answer Dumb IT Questions or Tell You the Meaning of Life
A Motorola Xoom tablet running Google's Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system and Google Body is shown at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., on Feb. 2, 2011.
Photographer: Tony Avelar/BloombergA robot could answer your next call to tech support, thanks to new artificial intelligence research at Google. The company taught computers how to have context-sensitive discussions with people about issues ranging from philosophy to humdrum IT help-desk tasks. It was outlined in a research paper published by the company last week.
Unlike traditional “chatbots,” Google's system is built without hand-coded responses or assumptions about the world, and instead learns to model language and conversation based on examples seen in corporate or public documentation. “Even though the model has obvious limitations, it is surprising to us that a purely data-driven approach without any rules can produce rather proper answers to many types of questions,” according to the research paper.