
Can chat bots become smart? Is it hard? - amiddavid
There are many bot frameworks out there. Some supported by giants: API.AI (Google), Wit.AI (FB), IBM Watson....
There are many startups coming with their frameworks.<p>What all have in common is the need to train the bot to make it smart.
But how much training does it really need? Does it really need hundreds of sentences per a user intent (such as make a reservation) or does it need just 10-20 examples?
If the bots had those so many examples, would have 2016 made her promise of being the Bots year?<p>Another question, do we really need smart bots?
From the bots that are out there,  it seems most of them are just putting out a website in a linear conversation-like manner. They don&#x27;t seem too smart but they do the job and you don&#x27;t need much data to train them....<p>So before I enter botland, do anyone have a good idea of how much effort is needed to actually train the bot? Are their good practices on where to find training data?
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billconan
I got interested in chatbot few months ago and looked at few open source
implementations.

so far, my findings are disappointing.

the capabilities of those bots are very limited.

I remember there was a post here saying they've built the first layer bot. I
checked out.

it turned out to be a menu system. for each question you ask, you have to
select from few options by providing a number.

sounds exactly like the auto phone support system.

there are other deeplearning based ones I tried. but the replies they
generated were very random...

