What is the best way to respond to a telemarketing bothersome call? The most upvoted answer will probably be “to chat back and dive into the conversation”. A chatbot which can handle such kind of “annoying engagement” is exactly what Alibaba’s A.I. Lab is researching, and it’s currently being trialled on several products, one of which is the mobile voice recognizing smart speaker, Tmall Genie. The chatbot employs deep reinforcement learning algorithms, based on a broad range of general knowledge and speech processing technologies, to enable meaningful dialogue between bot and human. The product announcement came in the wake of last Friday’s Consumer Day gala, in which several spam calling and texting service providers were singled out.
