Chatbots work best when you speak to them with formal language

Are you terse and informal when speaking to an AI chatbot? Talking to an AI chatbot in less formal language, as many people do, reduces the accuracy of its responses - suggesting that either we need to be linguistically stricter when using a chatbot, or that the AIs need to be trained to better adapt to informality. Fulei Zhang and Zhou Yu at Amazon looked at how people begin conversations with human agents compared with a chatbot assistant powered by a large language model (LLM). They used the Claude 3.5 Sonnet model to score the conversations on a range of factors and found that people interacting with chatbots used less accurate grammar and were less polite than they were when addressing humans. They also used a slightly narrower range of vocabulary.