*Turing Test of intelligence? That's for pikers and sissies! What Amazon wants from a talking machine is some customer-facing engagement.
Steven Levy at the interview mike on Backchannel
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What are the conversational aspirations for the Alexa platform? Are our Echos something we should be talking to, or talking with?
Alexa is already providing a large set of utilities and experiences, where a few one-shot intents work with very high accuracy. From a conversational aspect, I think there a lot of trade-offs on doing it right. Alexa shouldn’t come back and ask you [needless] questions. That would be really frustrating. But Alexa should always ask a question when needed, and the ability to have a conversation is super important as well. Are you aware of the Alexa Prize competition?
This is the $2.5 million challenge to computer science students that you announced in September?
Yes. In academia it’s hard to do research in conversation areas because they don’t have a system like Alexa to work with. So we are making it easy to build new conversational capabilities with a modified version of the Alexa skills kit. This grand challenge is to create a social bot that can carry on a meaningful, coherent, and engaging conversation for 20 minutes.
Would that be a Turing-level kind of conversation, do you think?
No, the Turing test comes down to human gullibility — can you fool an outsider into thinking it’s a human? If you think about certain tasks, Alexa is already better than a human. It’s super hard for a human to play a particular song out of millions of catalog entries within a second, right? If you ask Alexa to compute factorial of 60, that’s hard for a human. So we definitely did not want it to be like a Turing test. It’s more about coherence and engagement.
What are people going to be talking about in these 20 minute conversations with Alexa?
We are giving topics. Like, “Can you talk on the trending topics in today’s newspaper?” We expect the social bot to be able to chat with you on topics like scientific inventions, or the financial crisis.
Have you had a lot of responses to the challenge?We got an overwhelming number of applications, hundreds and hundreds….
