Inside Facebook's Training Ground for Making Chatbots Chattier

The only trouble: They didn't really know how to chat. As Facebook and so many other Silicon Valley players trumpet the benefits of software that can carry on a conversation--apps that book your plane flights or manage your bank account through SMS-like dialogue--the technology still lags behind. In recent years, using what are called deep neural networks, companies like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have fashioned services that can reliably identify faces and objects in photos, recognize voice commands on smartphones, and translate from one language to another. But building bots that can truly carry on conversations is still proving elusive. It's an undertaking that requires a far more varied array of AI techniques; researchers are still trying to figure out how the different approaches all fit together, or whether they'll really work at all.