May 2017
Intermediate to advanced
348 pages
7h 53m
English
Content preview from Designing Bots
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
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 wife” refers to Barack ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.