Meena, Google's New Chatbot

Voice-based assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google' Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana have gained popularity. Though, all these smart assistants aren't conversational. Of course, they will tell us how the weather is, answer queries about the news, play songs but it's not really conversational.

Google, with its new chat companion called Meena, wants to change that. As per a report by Venture Beat, Meena is a neural network that has around 2.6 billion parameters. "We present Meena, a multi-turn open-domain chatbot trained end-to-end on data mined and filtered from public domain social media conversations. This 2.6B parameter neural network is trained to minimize perplexity, an automatic metric that we compare against the human judgement of multi-turn conversation quality," said Google in a post. However, Google hasn't made it clear when correctly and how can users actually interact with Meena.

The report further says that Meena is trained on 40 billion words. As per Venture Beat Meena, uses a "seq2seq model and a variation of the popular Transformer architecture."

Google also talked about the Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA), which is a metric created by Google researchers. The SSA helps measure the ability of a conversation agent to maintain responses in any AI-based conversation that is specific and also makes sense. According to Google, humans generally rank around 86% on SSA tests. Meena, in the initial tests he obtained a high of 79%. Of course, this is, Google's own metric to judge the conversational ability based on artificial intelligence. Other companies use different methods to assess how conversational AI-based assistants are.

Interestingly, Microsoft has a social chatbot also, and it's called XiaoIce, which can converse in Mandarin as too. As per Microsoft, "XiaoIce has had more than 30 billion conversations, averaging up to 30 minutes each, with 200 million users across platforms in China, Japan, the United States, India and Indonesia," the company said in a blog post published in 2018.