Facebook teaches machines to negotiate with humans

Though Facebook is rarely mentioned alongside Apple, Microsoft and Amazon in discussions about conversational AI, the company has published a hoard of papers that underscore a deep interest in dialog systems. As has become clear with Siri, Cortana and Alexa, dialog is hard -- it requires more than just good speech recognition to deliver a killer experience to users. From the sidelines Facebook has been tinkering with big challenges like natural language understanding and text generation. And today the Facebook AI Research team added to its portfolio with a paper bringing negotiation into the conversation (all puns intended). Facebook's team smashed game theory together with deep learning to equip machines to negotiate with humans.