AI needs to work on its conversation game

When you have a conversation today, notice the natural points when the exchange leaves open the opportunity for the other person to chime in. If their timing is off, they might be taken as overly aggressive, too timid, or just plain awkward.

The back-and-forth is the social element to the exchange of information that occurs in a conversation, and while humans do this naturally -- with some exceptions -- AI language systems are universally bad at it.

Linguistics and computer science researchers at Tufts University have now discovered some of the root causes of this shortfall in AI conversational skills and point to possible ways to make them better conversational partners.

When humans interact verbally, for the most part they avoid speaking simultaneously, taking turns to speak and listen. Each person evaluates many input cues to determine what linguists call "transition relevant places" or TRPs. TRPs occur often in a conversation. Many ...