When you think of chatbots, you likely think of them as rather basic – answering questions without much character or personality. But could chatbots develop more unique personalities over time if they are continually learning from conversations?
Chatbots like Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant have been interacting with people for years now. With each new voice question or command, these AI programs receive valuable data. Their machine-learning systems analyze conversations to improve responses. In theory, this ongoing experience of interacting with humans could allow chatbots to slowly build more distinct personalities.
Some experts believe that as chatbots become more advanced, being trained on massive datasets of human behaviours and language, their dialogue may start to show some quirks or tendencies that resemble a sense of identity. The personality could lean more friendly, funny or serious based on the types of discussions. Of course, any personality that emerges would be a result of its programming and data, not intentional by the bot itself.
For chatbots to truly develop personalities, they would need greater than surface-level responses. More context-aware, long-term memory and social/emotional skills are required. While speech recognition and answers get better quickly, building self-awareness will take much more advancement. Until then, chatbots may begin to mimic personalities through conversation tendencies rather than truly having an individual character of their own.
Though rudimentary personalities seem unlikely now, as technology progresses chatbots could potentially become complex enough to each establish a unique way of communication over many years of learning from people worldwide. Only time will tell if machine conversations can advance to that level of variability, but it presents possibilities for more human-like interactions as AI assistance becomes deeper.
