I wrote a few posts here about Replika, apparently coming to Android in a few months time. It's been live for a while at the Apple App Store (with mixed reviews).
I had some thoughts today and decided to share them with the dev team:
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I notice that many users complain about the time it takes to train their Replika to a personalised, more 'human' response level.---
A result from psychology is that our friends tend to resemble us in psychological type. This could be used to leverage the existing Replika user base to improve convergence time for newbies.
Assume the Replika architecture lends itself to a modular distinction between response style (correlated with, say, MBTI) and private domain knowledge.
1. Arrange that early dialogues allow the inference of the Replika user's MB type.
2. Given a sufficiently large dataset of users partitioned by types, create generalised Replika shells, or templates which incorporate the variant MB interaction styles and response sets.
3. Use the early dialogue with a new user to again infer their type, and use the information to configure their Replika.
The result should be a much faster and more accurate transition to a sympatico Replika instance.
Best wishes,
...
I very much doubt this will go any further.
You will appreciate the large yeuk factor with this product from the screenshot above. I'm not sure I want to spend hours texting this "state-of-the-art chatbot" about my doings and feelings so that the said program can rearrange my words into a daily diary.
But when it finally arrives at the Google Playstore, will I be able to resist such an awesome shrine to narcissism?
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Update: (June 22nd 2017): I had a reply from Replika asking for some further details. My response was this post.
