Tom Bocklisch - Conversational AI: Building clever chatbots

Description Most chatbots and voice skills are based on a state machine and too many if/else statements. Tom will show you how to move past that and build flexible, robust experiences using machine learning throughout the stack. Abstract Conversational software is everywhere: messaging apps have opened up APIs to bot developers and millions of consumers now own voice controlled speakers. But the tools and frameworks for building these systems are still immature. Tom will talk about Rasa, an open source machine learning framework for building conversational software. The talk will cover the algorithms Rasa uses to build flexible and robust voice and text systems, the trade offs in using supervised versus reinforcement learning, and whether it's really such a good idea to generate text with LSTMs. Outline: Components : NLU , DM , integration , NLG Overview of available tools and frameworks Describe how Rasa does NLU Motivation & a chatbot leading to state machine hell How Rasa does dialogue management. How to advance a bots capabilities - closing the loop and data collection. Current research topics and challenges. www.pydata.org PyData is an educational program of NumFOCUS, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization in the United States. PyData provides a forum for the international community of users and developers of data analysis tools to share ideas and learn from each other. The global PyData network promotes discussion of best practices, new approaches, and emerging technologies for data management, processing, analytics, and visualization. PyData communities approach data science using many languages, including (but not limited to) Python, Julia, and R. PyData conferences aim to be accessible and community-driven, with novice to advanced level presentations. PyData tutorials and talks bring attendees the latest project features along with cutting-edge use cases.