Facebook’s Experimental Answer to Siri | MIT Technology Review

Also see We're on the Brink of a Revolution in Crazy-Smart Digital Assistants (Wired)

"Automated virtual assistants such as Siri have been offered for a while. Why make an assistant where humans do some of the work?

Virtual assistants on the market, like Siri and Cortana, are like search – you can ask a question and get an answer, but it’s limited. People have always been frustrated. On average, people who use Siri every day or week only use it for three or four questions. It’s because they’ve been burned. Users stop using it, or use the things they know work.

We wanted to focus on tasks that no AI in the world can do. To do that you need to understand what people want but also make a plan to fulfill it. Nobody has the data to train machine learning to do that. We decided to have AI and humans working together. The AI helps the humans and in turn they train the AI."

Facebook’s Experimental Answer to Siri | MIT Technology Review