Document-editing Assistants and Model-based Reinforcement Learning as a Path to Conversational AI

Understand

Intelligent assistants that follow commands or answer simple questions, such as Siri and Google search, are among the most economically important applications of AI.

• Future conversational AI assistants promise even greater capabilities and a better user experience through a deeper understanding of the domain, the user, or the user's purposes.
• But what domain and what methods are best suited to researching and realizing this promise? In this article we argue for the domain of voice document editing and for the methods of model-based reinforcement learning.
• The primary advantages of voice document editing are that the domain is tightly scoped and that it provides something for the conversation to be about (the document) that is delimited and fully accessible to the intelligent assistant.