Google claims that the company has developed a new generation of chatbot that enables completely natural dialogues. For the new chatbot called Meena is a neural network used with 2,6 billion parameters. The bot has been trained with 40 billion words (341 GB of text). In addition, Seq2seq, a neural network that compares words from nearby paragraphs, was used to understand the relationships between words. The developers continued to use various other techniques to increase the context sensitivity of the dialogues.

Meena scores high on the 'Sensibleness and Specificity Average' (SSA) scale. This determines the quality of the communication between bot and human. Where humans score about 86%, Meena gets a score of 79%. Other bots score significantly lower.

Competitors Amazon and Microsoft also continue to develop chatbot technology. With the Alexa Prize challenge Amazon challenged development teams to create a bot that could conduct a dialogue lasting at least 20 minutes. In 2018, Microsoft acquired conversational AI startup semantic machines about improving Cortana. At the end of last year, Microsoft announced the further development of the Cortana app for Android and iOS.

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