From Eliza to XiaoIce:challenges and opportunities with social chatbots

Conversational systems have come a long way since their inception in the 1960 s.After decades of research and development,we have seen progress from Eliza and Parry in the 1960 s and 1970 s,to task-completion systems as in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA) communicator program in the 2000 s,to intelligent personal assistants such as Siri,in the 2010 s,to today’s social chatbots like Xiao Ice.Social chatbots’ appeal lies not only in their ability to respond to users’ diverse requests,but also in being able to establish an emotional connection with users.The latter is done by satisfying users’ need for communication,affection,as well as social belonging.To further the advancement and adoption of social chatbots,their design must focus on user engagement and take both intellectual quotient(IQ) and emotional quotient(EQ) into account.Users should want to engage with a social chatbot;as such,we define the success metric for social chatbots as conversation-turns per session(CPS).Using Xiao Ice as an illustrative example,we discuss key technologies in building social chatbots from core chat to visual awareness to skills.We also show how Xiao Ice can dynamically recognize emotion and engage the user throughout long conversations with appropriate interpersonal responses.As we become the first generation of humans ever living with artificial intelligenc(AI),we have a responsibility to design social chatbots to be both useful and empathetic,so they will become ubiquitous and help society as a whole.