Facebook built the perfect chatbot but can't give it to you yet

Facebook's experimental assistant, offered inside the company's Messenger app, shows the value of having a true digital butler in your pocket. Weizenbaum had suggested back in 1964 that something like this could make Eliza smarter, and within weeks it worked for M. Lebrun remembers being surprised after thanking the assistant for ordering movie tickets. Even if M were to automatically turn down the most complex of user queries, though, the sheer variety of their requests makes the goal of having algorithms take over from human trainers harder to reach. A technique called deep learning has recently made machine learning more powerful (memory networks are an example).