Facebook Is Teaching Chatbots to Talk With Help From Facebook | WIRED

See Introducing DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine (Facebook Code blog) for more details

"But a major challenge remains: building chatbots that can actually chat. Machines can mimic conversation in some ways, but they’re still a long way from really grasping the way humans talk. Late last month, in an effort to advance the progress of such AI—and score PR points against its rivals—Google open sourced one of the tools it uses for natural language understanding. (If you share, you get more people pushing the state-of-the-art). And today, not to be outdone, Facebook unveiled an important part of its own underlying technology, a natural language engine it calls DeepText.

Facebook is not yet open sourcing this technology. And the company is only beginning to use DeepText with its own services. But as described by Facebook, DeepText shows how the giants of the Internet hope to accelerate the progress of natural language understanding in the months and years to come. In building these systems, they aim to rely far less on humans and far more on data—enormous troves of online data."

Facebook Is Teaching Chatbots to Talk With Help From Facebook | WIRED