Facebook and Stanford researchers design a chatbot that learns from its mistakes

Chatbots rarely make great conversationalists. With the exception of perhaps Microsoft's Xiaoice in China, which has about 40 million users and averages 23 back-and-forth exchanges, and Alibaba's Dian Xiaomi, an automated sales agent that serves nearly 3.5 million customers a day, most can't hold humans' attention for much longer than 15 minutes. But that's not tempering bot adoption any -- in fact, Gartner predicts that they'll power 85 percent of all customer service interactions by the year 2020. Fortunately, continued advances in the field of AI research promise to make conversant AI much more sophisticated by then. In a paper published this week on the preprint paper Arxiv.org