Google AI has been reading sensual novels to advance conversation abilities

Google has been feeding saucy romance novels to a neural network, hoping it would improve its conversation abilities.

For the past few months, Google has been feeding sexy terms into its AI engine – all of it taken from steamy romance novels with titles like Unconditional Love, Ignited,Fatal Desire, and Jacked Up. Google’s AI has read them all — every randy, bodice-ripping page — because the researchers overseeing its development have determined that parsing the text of romance novels could be a great way of enhancing the company’s technology with some of the personality and conversational skills it lacks.

And it’s working, too. Google’s research team recently got the AI to write sentences that resemble those in the books. With that achievement unlocked, they’re now planning to move on to bigger challenges: using the conversational styles the AI has learned to inform and humanize the company’s products, such as the typically staid Google app.

The next step is to use this improved intelligence to humanize Google’s range of products and services, including Google Inbox’s ‘Smart reply’ feature, which could potentially offer more conversational responses.

[BuzzFeed]