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AI agony aunt learns to dole out relationship advice online

New Scientist

A Japanese tech company has trained an AI to give love advice to troubled hearts. NTT Resonant, which operates the Goo web portal and search engine, created a system called Oshi-el to answer people's relationship questions, like a virtual agony aunt. The researchers chose to focus on this genre of query as "non-factoid" questions are difficult for AI to address. "Most chatbots today are only able to give you very short answers, and mainly just for factual questions," says Makoto Nakatsuji at NTT Resonant. "Questions about love, especially in Japan, can often be a page long and complicated. They include a lot of context like family or school, which makes it hard to generate long and satisfying answers."