Personal assistants like Siri and Alexa can only provide canned responses to pre-programmed inputs and lack a human-like understanding of natural language.

Sure, we can ask Siri or Alexa to answer a question or perform an action for us. But Siri and Alexa can only respond to pre-programmed questions and commands. (You can find a detailed explanation of how personal assistants work here). They do not really understand what you are saying, and you cannot have a real conversation with a personal assistant like you can with another person.

Three-year-old children understand language. We have computers that can beat chess champions. Why is building computer systems that understand natural language so difficult? (Natural languages are the languages that people speak as opposed to computer languages).

It’s natural to think that the meaning of a sentence is the composite of the individual meanings of the words in the sentence. The meaning of a paragraph is the composite of the meanings of the sentences in the paragraph. The principle of compositionality was first put forth by philosopher Gottlob Frege in 1882 and states that the meaning of a sentence (or text) is the meanings of the individual words plus the syntactic rules for combining the word meanings. But this _literal meaning _is just the tip of the iceberg in human understanding. Language understanding involves far more than knowing the dictionary meaning of the words and applying grammatical rules.

#nlp #chatbots #natural language processing #your chatbot #conversation #why you can’t have a real conversation with your chatbot