Designing Bots

Chapter 10. Context and Memory

Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.

—OSCAR WILDE

MEMORY AND CONTEXT ARE a natural part of every human conversation. We have an implied understanding that our counterpart in the conversation remembers what we said a minute ago, or that they know that we are now talking about cars, or that they have an understanding of the thread of thoughts tied into a conversation. All of this is trivial for the human mind, but extremely hard for software.

Bot Amnesia

Here is an example of how bots fail in this simple task. Figure 10-1 is a humoristic gift that was given to every participant in a bot event in Europe this year. It symbolized the main problem that bot conversation faces today.

Figure 10-1. Bots often have trouble maintaining context

Many bots today focus on a request/response paradigm. In this paradigm each request has a new context, and all past contexts are forgotten. Some bots do a better job of maintaining context than others—for example, the Google Assistant bot isn’t bad (Figure 10-2).

Figure 10-2. Google Assistant does a decent job of following the thread of a conversation...

As you can see, the user in this example uses words like “his wife” and “their kids.” For us humans, it is trivial to understand that “his ...