ABSTRACT This proposal introduces a Dialogue Challenge for building end-to-end task-completion dialogue systems, with the goal of encouraging the dialogue research community to collaborate and benchmark on standard datasets and unified experimental environment. In this special session, we will release humanannotated conversational data in three domains (movie-ticket booking, restaurant reservation, and taxi booking), as well as an experiment platform with built-in simulators in each domain, for training and evaluation purposes. The final submitted systems will be evaluated both in simulated setting and by human judges. Index Terms-- dialogue challenge, end-to-end taskcompletion dialogue 1. INTRODUCTION There are many virtual assistants commercially available today, such as Apple's Siri, Google's Home, Microsoft's Cortana, and Amazon's Echo. With a well-designed dialogue system as an intelligent assistant, people can accomplish tasks easily via natural language interactions.

We are surrounded by artificial intelligence. From the Google Home and Amazon Echo, to Facebook's facial recognition and whatever it is Huawei's doing. It's easy to become desensitized to the term and misunderstand the current state of AI we live in. Verge video director Becca Farsace talks to some experts in the field of AI to better pinpoint what all this AI really means.

Four ways to explore the use of voice technology for your business. As Microsoft uses AI to chase down Amazon in retail, Google is drawing on its freakishly human-sounding Duplex technology to beat Microsoft in the call center. Google is hatching a plan to win over contact centers using its AI, announcing a slew of new features for its Dialogflow Enterprise Edition, which borrows from its own deep learning and AI research, as well as groundbreaking AI from Alphabet-owned DeepMind. The service, which launched in beta in April, aims to help customers build natural-sounding chatbots for the contact center, as well as phone-based conversational agents. It comes just days after Microsoft revealed its roadmap for Dynamics 365, including the new Dynamics 365 AI for Sales app, which will be in public preview in October, and is meant to help sales teams make decisions using call sentiment analysis and to deliver warnings about deals at risk.

When Google introduced routines to Assistant, it promised that you'd eventually have the option to schedule those routines instead of having to invoke them yourself each and every time. That feature is finally here -- Google has confirmed a Droid Life report revealing that scheduled routines are now reaching users. If you have an Assistant-equipped smart speaker, you can use the Home app to make multi-step actions repeat on specific days. You could adjust your lights and play music when you get up for work on weekdays, for instance. The company told Engadget that the feature is currently available only to smart speaker users in the US, all of whom should have access within a week.

Anyone who's had a frustrating interaction with Siri or Alexa knows that digital assistants just don't get humans. What they need is what psychologists call theory of mind, an awareness of others' beliefs and desires. Now, computer scientists have created an artificial intelligence (AI) that can probe the "minds" of other computers and predict their actions, the first step to fluid collaboration among machines--and between machines and people. "Theory of mind is clearly a crucial ability," for navigating a world full of other minds says Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the work. By about the age of 4, human children understand that the beliefs of another person may diverge from reality, and that those beliefs can be used to predict the person's future behavior. Some of today's computers can label facial expressions such as "happy" or "angry"--a skill associated with theory of mind--but they have little understanding of human emotions or what motivates us.

As hot as stories about artificial intelligence (AI), augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR), blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT) have been in recent months, we often can't help but think of these technologies as a long way off from mainstream adoption. Movies like Ready Player One and Avengers: Infinity Wars only perpetuate this perception by mixing real technologies with fantasy, making the tech we wield in the real world seem primitive in the process. AI, AR/VR, blockchain, and IoT are already playing an important role in our everyday lives, with countless examples hiding in plain sight. In this first article, we're going to look at Artificial Intelligence (AI). In pop culture, AI is often represented as a highly-evolved and self-aware artificial "brain" in a robot capable of overthrowing the human race, as in Ex Machina or The Terminator movies.

Artificial intelligence has become such a catchy selling point for online services that some companies have turned to a bit of sleight of hand -- and voice -- to convince people they have smart machines working for them. Several companies have employed humans to impersonate chatbots performing scheduling and other services. A prototype for Facebook's AI assistant for Messenger, called M, had people behind the curtain calling M's shots for two and a half years before taking humans out of the equation in January. Amazon's Mechanical Turk reportedly used people to transcribe some expense and benefits documents Amazon's touted SmartScan software was supposed to be doing but couldn't handle. To anyone who has dreaded the labyrinthine house of mirrors automated call systems have become, it might seem odd companies want to pretend to have a machine on the other end of the line rather than a human, but there are several factors at play.

This week's news has once again been dominated by the subject of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The most exciting piece of AI news has come out of IBM, this week the people behind Watson have revealed Project Debater. Project debater can argue with people, now that might not sound like a good thing but it actually displays a range of impressive technical feats. Firstly, it can understand the context of what someone is saying during a debate which shows how far the technologies used in chatbots or conversational AI have come. This is especially true when you take into account the fact that when it gave a response for its side of the debate, it created the narrative for its argument.

Alicia Silverstone's bubble-headed Cher, from the 1995 comedy Clueless, would go gonzo over Amazon's hands-free camera, the Echo Look. She said in the film: "I don't rely on mirrors, so I always take Polaroids." That girl knew a mirror distorts your image, but a picture--or, better yet, a video clip--gives you a pretty good idea of how your clothing looks to other people. The Echo Look is a $200 voice-activated camera that snaps full-body photos and six-second video clips of your daily looks. It comes with a companion app that does two things: It tracks what you wear each day, and it uses that information to offer up fashion advice (including suggestions of complementary togs you can buy from Amazon). Announced in April 2017, but until recently available for purchase only by invitation, the Look is a significant departure from the rest of the Echo lineup.

Vienna's residents and tourists do not have to rely on the kindness of strangers or scroll through long lists of website links to find parking, restrooms or other critical information. They can simply use WienBot, the Austrian city's chatbot. Available via Facebook Messenger, WienBot provides answers to an array of user questions and continuously learns from the interactions -- even pre-empting questions as it captures the most frequently used terms. WienBot is a perfect example of how governments can use artificial intelligence (AI) to go digital, one of the biggest challenges for cities, states and nations worldwide. Bettina Tratz-Ryan, research vice president at Gartner, says developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and AI-powered chatbots will allow government CIOs to customize and improve the delivery of services for the citizens they serve.