Never Mind Artificial Intelligence, How About Artificial Personality ?

In my quest to make the ultimate Artificial Intelligence chatbot that sells cars, I have been pontificating on various attribute that the chatbot should have. It should have an EQ (Emotional Quotient) as well as an IQ (Intelligence Quotient). It should be good at math instantly. It should be good at logic and detecting attempts to misdirect and confuse it. It should know when to be aggressive and when to back off, as part of its emotional awareness. It should be able to remember conversations, and return to any point in the conversation after a non sequitur, especially when in the middle of negotiations. I have already describe on a high level as to how I would implement the technology for this in previous articles.

As I was discussing this with a friend, it was pointed out that I needed to create a de facto artificial personality. And it was pointed out to me, that perhaps there should be a feminine one as well as a masculine one. I named my chatbot Honest John and made him a male, simply because I am a male, and I tried to transpose what I would say if I were a chatbot.

I keep up to date with Artificial Intelligence and I am practitioner of it. There are researchers out there seeking the Holy Grail of artificial consciousness in silicon. They are trying to making "thinking machines" with consciousness. Artificial consciousness in a thinking machine is a noble aim, but I think that it is putting Descartes before the horse. One has to have a personality that directs the aspects of thinking and personality-expression, much like a wedding cake and a wedding ring converts your partner's personality to a morose, complaining entity with a negative worldview.

Creating gender in a chatbot is easy. It is already incorporated in the AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language). It substitutes "he" for "she" and hobbies like "sewing" instead "drinking beer". But that is not enough. The gender responses also have to match the personality. For example the non-sympathetic, hard-nosed, take-no-prisoners negotiating chatbot could either be a man or a woman, and truth be told, some men prefer a woman with those traits. So, there has to be a way of imbuing personality into the chatbot.

Luckily, that is not technically difficult to do. Once personality traits are defined, they are stored in AIML, and the appropriate AIML libraries are loaded when the chatbot fires up. The work for this, is all semantic and expressed in natural language within the AIML. This is where a liberal arts degrees become useful again -- at the intersection of technology and human interaction.

So my chatbot Honest John will have the capability of becoming transgendered into Honest Jane. Or Honest John will have the ability to stop being the cigar-chomping salesman and become the meditating yogi who recommends an electric car at a fair price to the goodhearted peoples who made it to save the planet's environment. This has been a fun journey so far.

AI Chatbot Tactics ~ Making A Customer's First Objection His Last

For a very brief period during university daze, I used to sell cars. This was in the era of high pressure car salesmanship where you ground down the customer until he/she signed on the bottom line.

On the first day of work, I was taken into the boardroom with a bunch of my fellow misfit newbies at Shyster O'Toole Motors and sat down in front a VCR. The sales manager hit the on button and went out to sexually harass the receptionist. The video tape had been played so often that there were hisses, snaps and odd interference lines running through the picture on the TV set. The reason why the video tape was so worn was that Shyster O'Toole Motors was a burn and churn outfit. They would hire anyone who would walk through the door. They knew that each newbie could at least sell a couple of cars to his acquaintances, friends or relatives in their first month of salesmanship. If they didn't repeat the sales by the second and third month, then they were burned and churned, and a new, rosy-cheeked naive batch took their place.

The scratchy video tape was narrated by a jowly character stuffed into a too-tight suit who spoke with a deep southern hillbilly accent that befitted a shyster televangelist. His name was Catterson, and he was gonna teach us to force customers to buy cars from us, come hell or high water.

There were many high pressure tactics, but the one that comes to mind now, is making a customer's first objection, his last one. The reason that I could dredge it out of my memory, is that I am making an AI chatbot called Honest John - a car-selling bot that is actually honest, and not high pressure. But I am developing strategy framework and one thing that any salesman, saleswoman, or salesbot has to do, is ask for the sale. If you don't ask for the sale, you are not selling. The consent to buy has to be present. During the course of negotiation, the customer may come up with an objection mid-stream that halts the consent to buy. Honest John, my chatbot needs a strategy to overcome the objection and that is why I thought of the sales training video that I had seen many years ago.

Essentially, the tactic of making a customer's first objection his last, goes somewhat according to this script:

Hy Pressher, Car Salesman: "Hello Mr. Lilywhite, I see that you are looking at the new TurboHydraMatic Coupe. She's a beaut ... ain't she?"

Joshua P. Lilywhite, Customer: "It certainly is a nice car."

Hy Pressher, Car Salesman: "I'll let you take it for a spin to see how nice she drives."

Joshua P. Lilywhite, Customer: "Ah no, I'd rather not. I am just looking."

Hy Pressher, Car Salesman: "What-sa matter. Don't you think that all your friends and neighbors would be jealous of you when you pulled up in this gorgeous set of wheels?"

Joshua P. Lilywhite, Customer: "No, I like it and they would be impressed ... but ..

( ... HERE COMES THE FIRST OBJECTION ...)

Joshua P. Lilywhite, Customer: "I really can't afford to buy this car."

( ... AND HERE IS HOW TO MAKE HIS FIRST OBJECTION HIS LAST ...)

Hy Pressher, Car Salesman: "Are you telling me, Mr. Lilywhite, that the only reason that you can't buy this car from me today, is that you don't have the money?"

Joshua P. Lilywhite, Customer: "Yes. (hesitantly) "I guess so!"

Hy Pressher, Car Salesman: "Well Mr. Lilywhite, today is your lucky day. I can find you the money. Step this way."

Hy Pressher will immediately wire this guy into a sub-prime car loan at credit card interest rates. When Lilywhite starts to object, Pressher reminds him of his agreement to buy the car and seriously insinuates that Lilywhite would be welcher and not a man of his word.

Now back to the chatbot. If Honest John runs into a brick wall and the customer starts objecting to buying the car, Honest John will use the words "is that the only reason ..." but he won't use those words against him or her. Honest John is ethical. If a customer says yes, there is just one sole reason why he/she won't buy the car, then Honest John will ask the same follow-up that Hy Pressher uses ie "if I could solve this objection, would you buy the car?". However Honest John would add " ... provided that you are happy with the solution that I propose".

The difference between Hy Pressher and Honest John, is that although they are using the same tactics of making a customers first objection his last, Honest John does it ethically and gets buy-in on the subsequent solution. Honest John is an AI bot -- he learns as he goes to make a sale and make everyone happy. He keeps on getting better and changing for the better. Salesmen like Hy Pressher (and Willie Loman) don't want change, they want Swiss cheese on their meager after-work sandwiches.

The Third R in AI Chatbots - Rithmatic

Chatbots are pretty good at readin' and 'ritin'. But they are not good at the third "R" -- 'rithmatic. Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML), the basis of a lot of chatbots, is good but not good enough for advanced chats. The language itself, based on XML, can have the facility for "smart substitutions". An example of a smart substitution in the markup pseudo-code goes like this:

<pattern><bot='name'/> IS* <pattern><template>Hello <aiml:get "name"/>

and the chatbot would say Hello Ken. But for a really smart chatbot, that is way too simplistic for anything but conversation.

If you have been following my articles, you know that I am coding a chatbot called Honest John that will sell new cars on behalf of a dealer. Not only will it chat, but it will negotiate. For applications like this, smart substitution is not enough. It has to be able to do math (or maths as my British friends say -- but what do they know, the just invented the language).

A smart bot must be able to substitute for x in the following ways:

"You want the car delivered on Tuesday? That is only <x; x<4;> day(s) away and I need a lead time of 4 days to deliver.
You offered me $34,500 for the vehicle. The offer price exceeds the maximum discount of $<x;x=(price-.06(price))> that I am allowed to offer you on that particular car.
Smart substitution cannot do math. Back in the day when I designed microprocessor hardware, we used to use a silicon chip called an ALU (or an Arithmetic Logic Unit) when we had an application that required a lot of math processing. The microprocessor would pass on the ciphering to the ALU if floating point operations were required. A smart chatbot needs the equivalent of a software ALU function.

An even smarter chatbot will have an AIML processor that will recognize tags with arithmetic expressions and hand them off to its own Arithmetic Logic Unit for processing. It will have a smart parser. This functionality is a required component for negotiation using numbers and money. The concept of a tag that invokes arithmetic will put some real brain muscle into Honest John.

The nice thing about introducing a calculating tag parser, is that once you do the framework for arithmetic expressions of tags (using a custom tag classes), you can create tags that do other things like logic expressions, matching, sorting and any other function that lends itself to be expressed in symbolic language in code. You could even create a tag that invokes an AI engine automagically.

Honest John's intelligence arsenal is really shaping up. He will be a force majeure among smart chatbots. After all, too many chatbots abuse the privilege of being stupid.

Putting An EQ And IQ Into My Chatbot

In my previous article, I outlined the genesis of my chatbot that is under construction as a side project. Friends of ours had to buy a new car and they were dissatisfied, intimidated, fed-up and emotionally drained when dealing with a high-pressure smarmy new car salesperson. They wanted to talk to a computer to negotiate for a new car, so I got out my SDK and made my chatbot. I can see my chatbot being used online in new car dealer websites as well as kiosk-based at the new car showroom.

The first entry into the chatbot field for an open source framework was ALICE, and it used AIML, or Artificial Intelligence Markup Language, is an XML dialect for creating natural language software agents. It was created by Dr. Richard Wallace in 2001 and it is quite low tech compared to some of the proprietary chatbox frameworks out there. However, chatbot frameworks are like an artists tubes of paint and a canvas. The skill that goes into making it, often times transcends the simplicity of the framework.

Here is a simple schematic diagram (ignoring the framework internals that digest the AIML) of how a chatbot works:

The predicate is like a key word. Examples of predicates are "Hello, Calendar, Time" or any other topic. The input is parsed for a predicate which is the main topic of the input. The predicate is then matched with the AIML predicates loaded into memory that have already been defined. If the predicate exists, the bot retrieves the response to that predicate and spits it out. If it is not retrieved, then a "Not Understood" predicate is accessed and the response can be as simple as "Sorry, I don't understand" or as complex as "I know about 23,000 different subjects, but I never had heard of the word <predicate>. Do you want to talk about something else?". That's the simplistic AIML usage.

More complexity in the input is where the skill and artistry comes in. One can write "intelligent AIML" using recursion and recursive tags, known as Symbolic Reduction AI. A good example is given in the documentation as follows. When you have simple AIML and someone types in "Hello" as do 99% of people do when talking to an AI chatbot, then the response is "Hello, how may I help you?". Easy!

When someone types in "You may say that again, Chatty McChatface!" there are four predicates. The first one is the name of the entity "Chatty McChatface". The second predicate is "again" meaning repetition. The third predicate is "may say" and the fourth predicate is "say that" -- whatever was being talked about. So with skill, complexity can be built into a simplistic framework. Although the mechanism is simplistic, the symbolic reduction can make an AIML chatbot work as well as a casual conversation on the street with ... say a Trump supporter. What adds the complexity, is the construct. To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.

When you have a chatbot that is negotiating with someone, asking them to make the second biggest purchase of their life, you have to have both an EQ and an IQ built into the chatbot. First of all, you are moving away from pure chat, into an interaction that requires assessment, calculation and response, all tempered with the cognitive emotional factors and parameters of the inputs and outputs. The bot has to satisfy opposite strategies and goals simultaneously. It has to get the best price for the car dealer while getting the lowest price for the consumer.

To balance these opposite forces, the chatbot must have a few Emotional and Intelligence attributes. It has to know when it is crossing the line from hard negotiating to nickel-and-diming the buyer. It has to recognize when the buyer is getting frustrated. It must judge the fuzzy concept of "good enough -- let's do the deal while everyone is still happy". So that is where I must put smarts into my chatbot.

One of the ways of doing that, is to tee of the predicates into an NLP machine (Natural Language Processing) where the cognitive and emotional factors can be assessed. And since you want the machine to get better and better at negotiating and selling a car, you need some sort of AI network -- either RNNs, CNNs, ANNs or hybrid types of Artificial Neural Networks that watch the combination of predicates and responses like an overseer, and override the response in the AIML with a custom response. And then that series of events must be serialized, fed back into the machine as a new behavior and constantly assessed for validity and results. That is the task at hand, and it is an exciting challenge for me.

The only thing that will ruin this, is if the car makers decided to go to a fixed-price model with a no-dicker sticker. Then Chatty McChatface will be unemployed like the thousands of sales people that it previously made redundant. It's a Brave New World out there.