How far away are we from sophisticated conversational AI?

DialPort Portal, the first multi-domain web-based spoken dialog systems developed by Tiancheng Zhao, Kyusong Lee, Maxine Eskenazi et al. at Carnegie Mellon University 2015. [Photo：courtesy of Tiancheng Zhao a young scholar in the field of deep-learning dialog systems]

In the past few years, advances in artificial intelligence have captured the public imagination. AI-powered assistants on our phones, like Siri, Cortana and Alexa, and more recently in the home, help to bring the concept of conversational AI into the mainstream.

In fact, some researchers believe that within three to five years, advances in AI will make the conversational capabilities of computers vastly more sophisticated.

Tiancheng Zhao is a young scholar in the field of deep-learning dialog systems. [Photo: courtesy of Tiancheng Zhao]

Today we invite a young scholar in the field of deep-learning dialog systems into our studio, to share with us his ideas of artificial intelligence and chatbots, and what we can expect in the coming years. Mr. Tiancheng Zhao is a Ph.D. student at Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.

[The audio clip is from Studio+, produced by CRI]