Yesterday Yandex, the Russian technology giant, went ahead and released a chatbot: Alice! I’ve gotten in touch with the folks at Yandex, and fielded them my burning questions:
What’s unique about this chatbot? Everybody and their dog has a chatbot nowadays. Where is Alice adding value?
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Why did you give it a female name? It’s the question that stumps many a chatbot developer, and has led to many an ethical query.
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How are you going to ensure it doesn’t turn into a racist troll? I’m sure we all remember last time that happened.
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How can businesses and developers be a part of this? Tell us about open source goodies, and the opportunities for businesses to build on this technology.
I’ve got answers in from Misha Bilenko, who is head of the Machine Intelligence and Research (MIR) department at Yandex, after a decade working at Microsoft.
Here’s what he said:
The Alice chatbot is an expert in Russian
What’s unique about the Alice chatbot?
Misha Bilenko: “In developing Alice, we utilized our knowledge of the more than 50 million monthly users who interact with Yandex services.”
“Coupling our machine learning capabilities and 20 years of experience with Russian users and language, we started experimenting with a personal assistant to specifically serve the needs of Russian users.”
“We leveraged our speech technologies, SpeechKit, which currently provide the world’s most accurate Russian language recognition”
“The new Yandex AI assistant provides human-like responses showcasing superior Russian language skills, a distinct personality with a sense of humor, and an ability to understand incomplete phrases and questions.”
“We leveraged our speech technologies, SpeechKit, which currently provide the world’s most accurate Russian language recognition. Based on word error rate (WER) measurements, Alice demonstrates near-human levels of speech recognition accuracy.”
“Russian language offers a unique set of challenges with its grammatical complexities and morphology. Yandex’s focus and expertise in the Russian language allowed us to train Alice to have a superior understanding of users and their various accents.”
- Why does it have a female name?
MB: “The name Alice was selected through a multi-step process. The team developing Alice came up with a list of names that met certain criteria to make commands to the AI assistant easier on the user.”
“For instance, the “r” sound is tough to pronounce for small children so names with “r” were excluded and very common names were also excluded so Alice wouldn’t accidently be set off by a conversation.”
“Developers then worked with sociologists and analysts to further develop the list of names, taking into account user preference for a female voice for voice-activated assistants.”
“The list was then entered into a survey on our crowdsourcing tool, Yandex.Toloka. Rather than ask users directly what name was best suited for an AI assistant, we asked users about certain traits associated with names. According to users, Alice is by far the best name suited for the qualities of our intelligent assistant.”
“The voice is based on Scarlett Johansson’s character in Her. Yandex used advanced methods of voice synthesis to make Tatyana Shitova’s [the voice-actor in the Russian dub of the movie] voice the voice of Alice.”
The voice of the Alice chatbot is based on the character from Her, a film by Spike Jonze
- How will you make sure Alice doesn’t go ‘rogue’?
MB: “It’s our goal to make Alice an interesting, dynamic character with witty responses but we also want Alice to answer users appropriately.”
“In order to address the challenges in launching an intelligent assistant with free flowing ‘chit-chat’, we spent a lot of time during development managing the content. This is particularly difficult given all the poor language on the internet.”
“In the event Alice provides an inappropriate response, users can flag the content, which will further help our algorithms teach Alice to avoid such responses”
“Using machine learning, we have successfully shut out unacceptable responses by creating blacklists for certain terms and phrases.”
“While we try to pre-filter responses, challenges will arise and this is an on-going task that we are committed to maintaining. In the event Alice provides an inappropriate response, users can flag the content, which will further help our algorithms teach Alice to avoid such responses.”
- What do developers/businesses have to look forward to?
MB: [RE:Business]“We are working to integrate Alice with other third party products and services in the future to increase functionality and use. We will have more to share on that at a later date.”
[RE:Developers]“At Yandex we are always looking to innovate. We hope to have more to share in the coming future.”
“Ultimately, we want Alice to become a basic platform to organize interaction between people and devices on all possible surfaces such as smartphones, desktops, smart homes, cars and any others.”