Machine learning is a powerful tool that enables conversational agents to provide general question-answer services. But in domains with more specific taxonomies – or simply for requests that are longer and more complicated than “Play Baby Shark” – custom conversational AI has long been the province of large enterprises with big budgets. But not for long, thanks to the work of Dr. Riham Mansour, a Principal Software Engineering Manager for Microsoft’s Language Understanding Service, or LUIS. She and her colleagues are using the emerging science of machine teaching to help domain experts build bespoke AI models with little data and no machine learning expertise.

On today’s podcast, Dr. Mansour gives us a brief history of conversational machines at Microsoft; tells us all about LUIS, one of the first Microsoft products to deploy machine teaching concepts in real world verticals; and explains how an unlikely combination of engineering skills, science skills, entrepreneurial skills – and not taking no for an answer – helped make automated customer engagement and business functions more powerful, more accessible and more intelligent!

https://www.microsoft.com/research