Rasa's conversational AI can selectively ignore bits of dialogue to improve its responses

What might be the key to chatbots or voice-enabled assistants that respond in more natural, human-like ways? Researchers at Rasa, a Berlin, Germany-based startup developing a standard infrastructure layer for conversational AI, believe selective attention might play an outsized role. In a preprint paper published this week on Arxiv.org, "Conversational AI assistants promise to help users achieve a task through natural language. Interpreting simple instructions like please turn on the lights is relatively straightforward, but to handle more complex tasks these systems must be able to engage in multi-turn conversations," wrote the coauthors.