We're going to be blunt: Chatbots in their current form aren't great. We were promised bots that would change the way we interact with businesses and services, but instead we have interactive bots that perform worse than apps. They are primarily focused on taps or interactive graphical interfaces, and conversing with them using natural language is nearly impossible. Take an example of Poncho Weather on Facebook Messenger. Let's say I'm going to a conference next Monday in San Diego and want to know what the forecast is.

Have you ever talked to Siri, Alexa, or Cortana to set up an alarm, call friends, or arrange a meeting? Many people may agree that despite their usefulness in common and routine tasks, it's difficult to force conversational agents to talk on general, sometimes philosophical topics. The Statsbot team invited a data scientist, Dmitry Persiyanov, to explain how to fix this issue with neural conversational models and build chatbots using machine learning. Interacting with the machine via natural language is one of the requirements for general artificial intelligence. This field of AI is called dialogue systems, spoken dialogue systems, or chatbots.

We're going to be blunt: Chatbots in their current form aren't great. We were promised bots that would change the way we interact with businesses and services, but instead we have interactive bots that perform worse than apps. They are primarily focused on taps or interactive graphical interfaces, and conversing with them using natural language is nearly impossible. Take an example of Poncho Weather on Facebook Messenger. Let's say I'm going to a conference next Monday in San Diego and want to know what the forecast is.

We're going to be blunt: Chatbots in their current form aren't great. We were promised bots that would change the way we interact with businesses and services, but instead we have interactive bots that perform worse than apps. They are primarily focused on taps or interactive graphical interfaces, and conversing with them using natural language is nearly impossible. Take an example of Poncho Weather on Facebook Messenger. Let's say I'm going to a conference next Monday in San Diego and want to know what the forecast is.

There has been growing interest in using neural networks and deep learning techniques to create dialogue systems. Conversational recommendation is an interesting setting for the scientific exploration of dialogue with natural language as the associated discourse involves goal-driven dialogue that often transforms naturally into more free-form chat. This paper provides two contributions. First, until now there has been no publicly available large-scale data set consisting of real-world dialogues centered around recommendations. To address this issue and to facilitate our exploration here, we have collected ReDial, a data set consisting of over 10,000 conversations centered around the theme of providing movie recommendations.