Personal assistants such as
Apple's Siri may be useful, but they are still far from matching the smarts and
conversational skills of a real person. Researchers at the University of
Rochester have demonstrated a new, potentially better approach that creates a
smart artificial chat partner from fleeting contributions from many
crowdsourced workers. Crowdsourcing typically involves posting simple tasks to
a website such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, where Web users complete them for a
reward of a few cents. The tasks are often simple, repetitive jobs that are
easy for humans but tough for computers, such as categorizing images.
Crowdsourcing has become a
popular way for companies to handle such tasks, but some researchers, including
the group at Rochester, believe it can also be used to take on more complex
tasks. When people talk to the new crowd-powered chat system, called Chorus,
using an instant messaging window, they get an experience practically
indistinguishable from chatting with a single real person. Yet behind the
scenes, each response is the result of tens of people paid a few cents to perform
small tasks: including suggesting possible replies and voting for the best
suggestions submitted by other workers.
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