Could this be a way to train your NPC’s in the future?
Or how a AI can be trained to do your job, hopefully as a helper not a replacement?
English and human language in general is not very … precise. There’s tons of things we just assume when we talk.
On normal circumstances we interpret what others say correctly, but there’s potential for misunderstanding.
Sometimes it’s fault of the hearer, but sometimes a phrase is just too ambiguous, so even a great AI machine could get it wrong. And lets face, sometimes people are lazy when speaking " Hey hand me that thing on top of that thing". You could fix this by being more precise when using English, though really you may just end up speaking in a similar way than programming languages.
Though for having AI or Robots taking orders from non-programmers humans, seems like a possible future.
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Or could a ‘programming AI’ take simple descriptive natural language and convert it to code?!
It definitely could, it’s a give or take between ‘descriptive’ and ‘natural’.
Natural = You give less information to the computer, and the computer figures out the rest using context and “common sense” that has been extensively programmed before-hand.
Descriptive = You need to be more specific and precise … much like your typical programming language.
This is where I would put my money. I think that there is no better bridge between an AI and a human being than spoken language.
However, and this is the important part, the language used would not be some new kind of coding language or anything like that. It would be a case of you telling the AI what you want in layman’s terms, and it knowing enough about programming to implement it.
I think people who are trying to reinvent coding through some other interface are missing the mark. Coding is already about as efficient as it can be for a human being without turning it into some kind of esoteric sport. The next step is not to reinvent the means of communication, but to refine the contents of the communication itself so that a person can communicate less, and get a computer to do more.
In my view, the biggest hurdle is going to be context awareness for an AI interface. If an AI can understand the ‘common sense’ unspoken boundaries of what you’re telling it to do, that’s when it becomes really useful. But there’s no way to teach common sense with if/else statements, you need fast adaptive learning and a very deep, very refined, and very navigable repository of contextual information such as a human being develops through experience.
I think it’s possible. Today’s tech is pretty impressive as it is, like Ok Google, I like the way it switches homophone words in order to make more sense out of what I’m trying to say, and it’s surprisingly accurate, even if I speak dumbly.
In addition, some tasks may not require a super high level of understanding. If you’re telling an automated taxi where to go, I’m sure speaking English normally is more than enough for AI to get it right, requiring no more confirmation that a human driver would. I bet you could even give AI voice different personalities … just to make it cool.
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The project used a ‘fixed set of instructions’. That’s not natural language at all. Natural language was simply a style choice, not a fundamental part of the process.
The game was a longer game, with a longer time horizon than other games that AI technology had mastered. So the fixed instructions were guiding patterns that allowed the AI to navigate a longer time/goal problem.
And the solution was to allow an AI to be guided by a human/domain expert.
So could this open the way for game designers to use AI systems to make games?
Spoken language is very ambiguous, so it is not a good bridge by itself. You’ll need to teach AI body language and intonation as well. Unless AI speaks Lojban, that is.
We haven’t been shown a video of the game in action but the example phrases they give are completely within the realms of a text adventure game from the late 70s and early 80s. There is already at least one game on Steam that is controlled via voice.
Watson Jeopardy, Siri… I think spoken language is good enough.
I think the problem is knowledge domains, or jargon. The aim here is to guide an AI to solve a problem not obstruct it e.g. Tell an AI about your game design or where you need to drive to.
Before looking at the article:
My first reaction was, that’s siri,alexa and okay google …
My second reaction was, what’s the input data and what’s the output data. Given what I know and what has been established, an AI (DNN) can look at an image and output what is happening in the image. Given a NN trained to pair of image instruction, I see this just a different application of something well documented by now (captions generation), instead of forming a phrase (ie a sequence of token) it turn it into actions (command instead of token, in term of application that’s the same).
Given a sufficient training, DNN excel at parsing ambiguous context on a level equivalent to human.
I think the model propose can be improve and generalized in multiple way, first go through a syntactic parser that will tokenized the sentence, in order to expose underlying information like word category, class and function, to have generic knowledge, make it so it access specific words (like name) through a tokenize memory (to keep the model agnostic of specific words with similar function like name). Train the model with those data on top of current, use a reverse parser to handle the memory as token, the NN would simply see and manipulate the tokenize memory and the parser would replace specific words under similar circumstance.
Jeopardy is not actually maintaining dialogue, and speaking of siri:
AI voice recognition still has a long way to go.
In the game @Ryiah mentioned there are people complaining that that voice recognition usually fail.
It is not a very good interface. Unless there will be a language designed for talking with robots.
Well voice recognition and semantic analysis are quite different problems, that’s unfair to lump them together.
I think it is fair, if the idea was to use speech as a “communication bridge with AI”. For this to work both voice recognition and semantic analysis needs to be perfect. Otherwise you’ll need to talk with AI in either lawyerspeak or in lojban. Neither of those is a good idea.
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In the context of getting the AI to program something you want, body language and intonation is probably not incredibly relevant.
A reasonably precise technical language would be necessary to describe the high-level attributes of what you want, but what the AI would need to mainly fill in has probably more to do with taking a few high-level attributes, and producing a comprehensive set of low-level attributes that are very likely to not contradict something that you didn’t explicitly say, but is nonetheless important. Basically something equating to a human worldview, and experience in the field.
I’m not talking about “speaking code with AI”, I’m talking about telling the AI what you would like in the same terms that you would describe it to a human programmer.
Yeah that’s what I mean, the idea is for the AI to already know 95% of what it has to do for any given task, and you only have to trigger it - and only replace its understanding of what you want with something explicit if it’s something that you would have to specify to a human being as well.
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I would say it depend on the scope of the domain problem, it works for data query (siri and co) but if you want to discussed why your last romance failed that’s sound like a big scope. Imho we are past the data query level already but not quite yet at a strong conversational AI yet (very obviously).
But the reason I make the distinction, is that voice recognition is currently decent, and semantic aspect are explored by voiceless chatbot. Chatbot don’t work very well in a strong conversational sense yet (only after a clever human anticipate and script a lot of context, and even then that’s still not enough) and they get the literal words out of your keyboards. So my reaction is that voice recognition is close to keyboards input in natural language conversation (not code like input though, but I haven’t thought through this one).
I haven’t seen anything convincing with any AI for semantic, past the context scope of a single sentence, anyway. AI would need long semantic dependency and I haven’t seen any architecture that support this yet. It only work on limited sequences then forgot the data (for NN, other method have exponential growth of the syntactic tree and its permutation, as I understand it)
The problem with siri and co is that it’s basically a chatbot with a voice interface, as such they suffer from limitation of chatbot, mostly that their domain are quite limited and the author didn’t anticipate domain like suicide prevention or domestic abuse (why a tech nerd would have thought of that anyway, time to hire non techy people with an eye for peoples). Also it has the failing and limitation of human too, ie they don’t have all the culture and vernacular of everywhere, so an AI to be registered as human like must actually be superhuman like.
Now for programming with voice, I need to what would be the requirement in the first place, I don’t think we have such hi level framework anyway in any format.
Properly describing a problem to a human programmer very often involves a huge design document and several hours of talking. And even after that misunderstandings can arise when things aren’t written down properly.
Which brings us back to lojban and lawyerspeak.
While I can agree that it improved, I don’t think it is decent. It’ll be decent when software will be able to accurately write down casual speech without people dictatating it. My android tablet has voice recognition enabled for 3 languages, and it has very hard time reliably recognizing voice input in any of them reliably. Basically, it tries to find the most similar sounding word, and often misses by the mile, sometimes incorrectly switching language in process. The idea is cool, but I haven’t yet seen a system that can easily catch user’s speech without user putting in extra effort to make sure he/she is understood properly.
I do agree that current voice services are pretty much chatbots, though.
The problem of casual speech is not that they can’t do it, is that they must do it for all form of human casual speech lol, even human has trouble with this, as long as you are only listening is fine, but when you put your mind to translate it into regular text suddenly things get complicated, casual speech is usually about the general vague idea rather than the precise wording (text translation would be more paraphrases), I don’t think it’s impossible, but you need the resource to chase this particular problem.
So lawyer speak is inevitable in the end whether it’s AI or people. Either you have the same background and can fill in the blank perfectly, and that only work with people you have work with for a very long time (or an AI trained sufficiently long on your works, which mean no out of the box magic solution) or you need a superhuman AI that had spies on humanity long enough to be omniscient 
That said small version can still work in very small domain. The next real breakthrough is when semantic parsing will be on the scope of an entire books or movie rather than one sentence or image.
We don’t have to aim for perfect, good enough will be already great, and we can adapt and learn to work around the limitation, like we do for all interfaces. After all even text itself isn’t a correct translation of the mind.