I'd be interested to see an example of an AI having a fairly coherent conversation. Most of the impressive seeming examples of this based on response ranking. W

I'd be interested to see an example of an AI having a fairly coherent conversation. Most of the impressive seeming examples of this based on response ranking. When a message from a human comes in, the system ranks the responses in its repository of human-written responses to find one that fits. Because the responses are human-written, they can seem locally coherent, but since the model generally isn't tracking any state, the conversation never really goes anywhere. Also, if you try to talk to one of these response rankers about something it doesn't have any canned responses for, obviously it doesn't work. Natural language generation on the other hand, where the model writes each response character-by-character or word-by-word, has the potential to do something much more interesting, but the state of the art there isn't quite at the level of "fairly coherent" AFAIK.