Google is attempting to build the
first digital assistant that can truly hold a conversation with an AI project
called Meena. Digital assistants like Alexa and Siri are programmed to pick up
keywords and provide scripted responses. Google has previously demonstrated its
work towards a more natural conversation with its Duplex project but Meena
should offer another leap forward.
Meena is a neural network with
2.6 billion parameters. Google claims Meena is able to handle multiple turns in
a conversation. A neural network architecture called Transformer was released
by Google in 2017 which is widely acknowledged to be among the best language
models available. A variation of Transformer, along with a mere 40 billion
English words, was used to train Meena.
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