Carsales.com, the company I work for, is holding a hackathon event. This is an annual event where everyone (tech or non tech) comes together to form a team and build anything — anything at all. Well, preferably you would build something that has a business purpose, but it is really up to you. This idea for this chatbot actually came from Jason Blackman, our Chief Information Officer at carsales.com.

Given that our next hackathon is an online event, thanks to COVID-19, wouldn’t it be cool if we could host a Zoom webinar, where any carsales.com employee could jump in to hang out and chat with an AI bot which we could call Jarvis, who would always be available to chat with you.

Brainstorming

After tossing around ideas, I came up with a high-level scope. Jarvis would need to have a visual presence, just as would a human webinar participant. He needs to be able to listen to what you say and respond contextually with a voice.

I wanted him to be as creative as possible in his replies and to be able to generate a reply on the fly. Most chatbot systems are retrieval based, meaning that they have hundreds or thousands of prepared sentence pairs (source and target), which form their knowledge bases. When the bot hears a sentence, it will then try to find the most similar source sentence from its knowledge base and simply return the paired target sentence. Retrieval based bots such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home are a lot easier to build and work very well to deliver specific tasks like booking a restaurant or turning the lights on or off, whereas the conversation scope is limited. However, for entertainment purposes like casual chatting, they lack creativity in their replies when compared to the generative counterpart.

For that reason, I wanted a generative based system for Jarvis. I am fully aware that it is likely I will not achieve a good result. However, I really want to know how far the current generative chatbot technology has come and what it can do.

#amazon-sagemaker #ai #generative-model #chatbots #artificial-intelligence