While the saucy language of romance novels and the high-tech world of artificial intelligence don’t sound like natural partners in crime, combining the two is exactly what Google has been up to for the past few months. Specifically, Google has been feeding a steady stream of romance novels to the AI engine that powers responses in its Google app in an effort to inject some personality and more conversational mojo, reports BuzzFeed.
As noted in the report, Google is leveraging romance novels due to the overarching narrative similarities each story shares. The thinking is that the AI can parse through each story to detect sentences with similar meaning in order to develop an understanding of how different words can be used to express the same idea. From BuzzFeed:
“In the Google app, the responses are very factual,” Andrew Dai, the Google software engineer who led the project, told BuzzFeed News. “Hopefully with this work, and future work, it can be more conversational, or can have a more varied tone, or style, or register.”
So far, Google has relied on a rather large library of around 2,865 romance novels which are fed into and processed by the engine. As it learns, the AI composes sentences and then draws comparisons to those in the novels. While responses in the Google app are the main focus for now, Google hopes that this process could also help to bring a more conversational air to Inbox’s Smart Reply feature as well.