5 NLP bots that are a little more than just marvels of AI research

Artificial Intelligence as we know it so far, has had its widest impact in the field of natural language processing and hence upon chatbots. The research and development of conversational agents have been going on right from the nineteen sixties. One after another companies have pitted their chatbots to qualify the Turing test to prove proximity with human speech. Some have succeeded, some have not. The band wagon has kept moving along. Today with deep neural networks and incredible computational tools at the disposal of scientists the chatbots are doing much more than answering queries on e-commerce sites. Let us look at five chatbots that are taking artificial interactions to the next level.

A Chatbot that helped UNICEF save Liberian school students from being exploited by teachers

U-Report is a chatbot used by UNICEF to run polls in developing countries to gather intelligence about various issues. This data helps them revise policies. The users of this application are called U-reporters. They respond to the polls and help UNICEF understand their problems. Recently UNICEF started a poll for Liberian children asking them whether the teachers in schools are trading grades for unethical favours. 86% of the 13,000 respondents voted positive. This resulted in a collaborative operation by UNICEF and the Liberian ministry of education which put end to this.

A trustworthy companion for patients of dementia

Endurance is an ambitious project by a team based in Russia. It aims to map the deviations in language among patients of dementia to alert their near and dear ones as to the deteriorating condition of the patient. Those diagnosed with dementia often exhibit loss of short term memory which makes conversations very challenging. Their speech is often characterised with disorientation. Trying to find a pattern in the disoriented, this truly is an incredible initiative. It is still under development and not yet available for the English speaking people. It is a marvel nevertheless.

Insomnobot 3000 to help you during sleepless nights

Insomnia is a chronic condition of not being able to sleep. According to various studies 10-30% of the population suffers from this. As Insomnia often comes as a result of clinical depression the sleepless hours can be really challenging for a lot of people especially because of the loneliness. Casper has created a bot that can start a conversation when you are wide awake at a late hour. It can start talking about something fun and engaging. It can  help you fight the tiring aloofness. Although the application itself needs a lot of work, the initiative is quite commendable.

MedWhat, a marvelous marriage of NLP and Machine learning

There are dozens of applications offering medical advice to users and sadly most of them can go horribly wrong at points. This application is not a chat agent but an assistant which aims to diagnose patients faster by interpreting their queries while tapping on the behavioral data the application has collected by interacting with thousands of human beings. It also draws upon a vast amount of peer reviewed research papers and medical history to be more accurate. This app uses the power of both state of the art natural language processing as well as advanced analytics powered by machine learning algorithms.

Duolingo, the bot that helps you learn a new language

The best way and the biggest challenge of acquiring a new language is trying out your skills in front of a native speaker. The primary issue is that of embarrassment. Suppose, you are a native speaker of English who is trying to learn French. There is always a risk of being mortified by a native French speaker who cannot figure out your pronunciation. It is an absolute mess. So, Duolingo helps you practise the new language with a chat agent, not a human one, of course. It even gives the chatbots different personalities to match your field. The learners will no doubt make mistakes during their conversation, and if the bot can interpret those mistakes correctly and correct them, that would truly be a great achievement.

These five chatbots which we talked briefly about are representative of a movement towards further humanization and innovation of natural language processing. The development of artificial deep neural networks has been the greatest triumph along the way. It is a global phenomenon now. Aspirants enrolling for any artificial intelligence course in India can spot great potential in this field. The linguists around the world too have a great opportunity to use their skills to take this forward.