Digital assistants like Alexa and Siri are programmed to pick up keywords and provide scripted responses. Google has previously demonstrated its work towards a more natural conversation with its Duplex project but Meena should offer another leap forward.

Meena is a neural network with 2.6 billion parameters. Google claims Meena is able to handle multiple turns in a conversation (everyone has that friend who goes off on multiple tangents during the same conversation, right?)

Google published its work on e-print repository arXiv on Monday in a paper called “Towards a Human-like Open Domain Chatbot”.

A neural network architecture called Transformer was released by Google in 2017 which is widely acknowledged to be among the best language models available. A variation of Transformer, along with a mere 40 billion English words, was used to train Meena.

Google also debuted a metric alongside Meena called Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA) which measures the ability of agents to maintain a conversation.

Meena scores 79 percent using the new SSA metric. For comparison, Mitsuku – a Loebner Prize-winning AI agent developed by Pandora Bots – scored 56 percent.

The result of Meena brings its conversational ability close to that of humans. On average, humans score around 86 percent using the SSA metric.

We don’t yet know when Google intends to debut Meena’s technology in its products but, as the digital assistant war heats up, we’re sure the company is as eager to release it as we are to use it.

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The company first launched its XiaoIce project back in August 2017. In April, Microsoft said it had achieved full duplexing — the ability to speak and listen at the same time, similar to humans.

Microsoft’s announcement was made before Google’s demonstration earlier this month but, unlike Google, the company had nothing to show at the time.

XiaoIce has now been demonstrated in action during a London event:

The chatbot is only available in China at this time, but it’s become incredibly popular with more than 500 million users.

XiaoIce also features over 230 skills and has been used to perform things such as creating news and hosting radio programs as part of its ‘Content Creation Platform’.

In a blog post, Microsoft VP of AI Harry Shum revealed that more than 600,000 people have spoken on the phone with XiaoIce since it launched in August.

“Most intelligent agents today like Alexa or Siri focus on IQ or task completion, providing basic information like weather or traffic,” wrote Shum. “But we need agents and bots to balance the smarts of IQ with EQ – our emotional intelligence.”

“When we communicate, we use tone of voice, word play, and humour, things that are very difficult for computers to understand. However, Xiaoice has the ability to have human-like verbal conversations, which the industry calls full duplex.”

As many have called for since the Duplex demo, and Google has promised, Microsoft ensures a human participant is aware they’re speaking to an AI.

One thing we’d love to see is a conversation between XiaoIce and Google Duplex to see how well they each hold up. However, let’s keep our hands on the kill switch in case world domination becomes a topic.

What are your thoughts on conversational AIs like XiaoIce and Duplex?

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