Tools to build Bespoke Conversational User Interfaces: A development platform with integrated crowdsourcing.

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The result of this research and development project will be a set of new software development tools that enable businesses to create their own bespoke, artificially intelligent Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs).CUIs operate on channels such as Amazon Alexa or Facebook Messenger and allow users to perform a range of tasks using natural language via voice or text.The planned work in this project follows work from project 105036 which demonstrated that, currently, commercial strength CUIs can only be developed with deep expertise in CUI design, computational linguistics, and machine learning. Existing development tools are not sufficiently sophisticated and result in CUIs that are oversimplified and not strong enough for commercial use.The CUI development environment that is proposed addresses this core barrier to entry in the CUI market. It will support businesses through all development lifecycle stages of CUI design, and, where beneficial, seamlessly enable crowdsourced assistance directly within this lifecycle when required.The crowdsourcing element of the tool seamlessly tasks:(i) external people working remotely who can collectively carry out low skilled, repetitive microtasks, such as creating and labelling large amounts of training data;(ii) external experts who can work remotely to carry out specialist macrotasks in the CUI development lifecycle; such expertise is typically unavailable within organisations wishing to create CUIs.The new tool will be developed by action.ai. Work is grounded on prior research and understanding of how reusable, commercial-strength CUIs can be created for specific business verticals.