Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has announced Project CAIRaoke, an AI project in conversational AI with an aim of underpinning the voice assistants of the future.

CAIRaoke is an end-to-end neural model that can power much more personal and contextual conversations than the systems people are familiar with today. Meta is already using the model that resulted from Project CAIRaoke in its Portal Meta’s video calling device, to make it easier to create and manage reminders, and the company plans to integrate it with future augmented and virtual reality devices.

Until now, assistants such as Amazon's Alexa have relied on four separate components, even though they're providing one single service. Under the covers, the components are natural language understanding (NLU), dialog state tracking (DST), dialog policy (DP) management, and natural language generation (NLG). These seprate AI systems then have to be linked together, and the Meta researchers say this makes them difficult to optimize, poor at adapting to new or unfamiliar tasks, and highly dependent on labor-intensive annotated data sets.

The new model uses a neural network and doesn’t prescribe conversational flow at all. This means it can be trained using just one set of training data. It is more flexible because it avoids the situation where changes to one component mean retraining all the subsequent modules.

The team says that Project CAIRaoke takes the technology that supports Meta AI’s latest conversational bot, BlenderBot 2.0, and uses it in task-oriented dialogs. This means that assistants built using the model could exhibit empathetic language, relay knowledge found by searching the internet in real time, and exhibit a consistent personality.

Writing on the Meta AI blog, Alborz Geramifard, Research Manager on the project, said:

"While our short-term implementation of the Project CAIRaoke model is for reminders on Portal, we hope to soon be utilizing it on much larger domains which will help personalize people’s shopping experiences, enable assistants to maintain context over numerous chats, and let people drive the flow of conversation."

More Information

Meta/Facebook AI Blog

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