Crowd workers, AI make conversational agents smarter

said braka 6:07 AM
The chatbot system, called Evorus, is not

the first to use human brainpower to answer a broad range of questions. What sets it apart, says Jeff Bigham, associate professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, is that humans are simultaneously training the system's artificial intelligence, making it gradually less dependent on people.
Like an earlier CMU agent called Chorus, Evorus recruits crowd workers on demand from Amazon Mechanical Turk to answer questions from users, with the crowd workers voting on the best answer. Evorus also keeps track of questions asked and answered and, over time, begins to suggest these answers for subsequent questions. The researchers also have developed a process by which the AI can help to approve a message with less crowd worker involvement.