Google wanted their bots to be smarter and eventually more conversational than the rest of the bots out there. And in order to do that they are technically feeding their AI machines with 2,865 romance novels so they could respond to conversations better.
Google has been working on 'educating' their AI engines for some time now, "For the past few months, Google has been feeding text like this to an AI engine - all of it taken from steamy romance novels with titles like Unconditional Love, Ignited,Fatal Desire, and Jacked Up" said Buzzfeed.
Google believes that by doing so, they could potentially inject some 'personality', conversational skills and who knows, maybe even a dash of 'compassion' into their artificial intelligence technology.
Andrew Dai, Google software engineer said in an interview with Buzzfeed "In the Google app, the responses are very factual...Hopefully with this work, and future work, it can be more conversational, or can have a more varied tone, or style, or register."
Compared to Siri, Google wanted to make the replies of their Artificial Intelligence to have more character and conversational skills.
Google further explained that they feed their AI machines with stories containing similar plots. In this way, the AI bots will learn how the same story was told using different manner and words, therefore gaining more skills in understanding the language.
But why choose romance novels? Well, Google said they romance novels instead of children's books or other literary works because "they offer a broad range of linguistic examples" according to Buzzfeed.
Teaching the AI machines the art of linguistics using romance novels is not easy. Google have to use the 'neutral network' which is a separate program which can learn on its own. Some say it can be compared to reading a book to a baby, the baby can then pick up some of it but not all, so it has to be done again and again until the AI absorbs the knowledge being fed to it.
The Verge said that Google might improve its 'smart reply' feature using this technology. And their artificial intelligence machine may also recognize sarcasm in the future.