Google’s LaMDA Project: What it is and How will it Help Enterprises?

Table of contents

• Introduction
• What is Google’s LaMDA Project?
• How will LaMDA help enterprises?
• Conclusion

Introduction

Google search has unarguably become the simplest source of answers for our queries in everyday lives. It has become second nature for us all to immediately open google search to get clarification on our queries. Just type your query, and there is your answer in milliseconds. But this simple search for us is not so easy when you consider what goes on in the backend of this query.

Chatbot technology integrated with voice recognition systems like Google assistant has changed the way we search our queries. Instead of typing in queries, we can just simply ask a query and get our answer. While the current technology can answer simple factual questions, human interactions or conversations are far more complex for Google Assistant to detect different languages, tone of voice, and human emotions in general. Thus, having long conversations with the current chatbots or virtual assistants lacks that human touch. This is the problem that Google LaMDA wants to solve.

What is Google’s LaMDA Project?

Focus of LaMDA

LaMDA stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications. Google LaMDA focuses on having human-like conversations by leveraging Artificial intelligence to forecast what users need and assist them in clarifying their queries and enable users to have an open-ended conversation with Google Assistant.

Traditional AI System Shortcomings

For simplicity, what we have seen in traditional Artificial Intelligence systems is that it lacks a human-like conversation capability. While traditional AI systems can give accurate answers to simple factual questions but it struggles to have a complex conversation. While it can answer basic questions, it cannot recognize human emotion, cannot have a conversation between multiple topics simultaneously, and does not use predictive models to engage in a more human-like manner. This is what the LaMDA project intends to change.

How LaMDA differentiates itself from Traditional AI System 

In contrast to the traditional AI system, LaMDA can vacillate between topics during a conversation while trying to make the responses sensible and specific. This will help Google Assistant facilitate engaging conversations with humans in a natural way on a wide range of topics. Google will also be able to answer everyday queries in a more friendly manner. In the future, there will be a focus on LaMDA understanding unstructured and complex information like videos, images, audio files and eventually integrate with Google Workspace to create improve the current capabilities of developers and enterprises.

How will LaMDA help enterprises?

Here are 7 ways in which LaMDA can help enterprises in the future –

Building intelligent and highly efficient chatbots

Chatbots are the best-suited technology for the LaMDA project. LaMDA can help enterprises build chatbots that have the capabilities to have a human-like conversation with customers which will ensure better customer satisfaction and improved customer experience. E-Commerce applications or websites can integrate these chatbots to improve the customer shopping experience.

Solving FAQs through AI instead of human customer support

Due to the repetitive nature of FAQs, instead of hiring individuals, LaMDA integrated assistants can be used to answer the questions. The benefit from this will be enterprises saving overhead and operational costs which will ensure better profitability in the long run. Since the chatbots will be capable to have human-like interaction with customers, they can answer the same query in a different manner depending upon human emotion and customer needs.

Improve user experience during the purchase

Integrated LaMDA AI chatbots can use Natural Language Processing (NLP) and use algorithms similar to BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) to identify customer preferences which will help in better product recommendation. LaMDA can build models that can predict human emotions which will ensure an improved shopping experience.

Better safety and privacy standards

Models which are trained on datasets from the internet may contain bias on specific topics that might result in them mirroring hate speech or spreading out misleading information. LaMDA will ensure high standards of fairness, accuracy, safety, and privacy are met as the models will take into account other forms of information external to the database to give an unbiased, accurate and fair response.

Mobile Applications support open-ended or guided conversations

LaMDA will enable open-ended human-like conversations. This is where mobile applications can benefit from the technology. E-commerce mobile applications can improve the shopping experience, while other applications can integrate it to answer FAQs. Gaming applications can build NPCs that can have open-ended and unscripted conversations depending upon the in-game cutscenes that will immensely improve the gaming experience.

Enhance interactive capabilities of newer tech products

Nowadays, the tech industry is flooded with newer tech products. LaMDA can improve the current conversational capabilities of various tech products such as smartphones, car assistants, smart speakers, and intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs). This will improve the overall customer experience while using these gadgets.

Ensure specificity, factuality, interestingness, and sensibleness in AI chatbots 

LaMDA will help build models that will ensure the conversation is specific to the query asked and give factual but human-like responses that will keep the conversations interesting. It can help assign different personalities to different objects. During Google’s I/O event, the model was assigned the role of Pluto. Thus, the responses were given by the LaMDA model considering itself as the planet Pluto and gave human-like responses.

Conclusion

While the LaMDA project is still at a nascent stage. It has a long way to go. Eventually, these intelligent conversational models will be integrated with Google Workspace, Google Assistant, and other third-party applications to ensure human-like conversations. If it works and is widely adopted, we may see a shift in search behavior and will change the way we search queries, shop online, interact with customer support, and many other applications.