Crowd-talk yields great answers, says university team
(Phys.org)—Move over, Siri. Some researchers from the University of Rochester in collaboration with a University of California, Berkeley, mathematician/crowdsourcing entrepreneur, have come up with a killer personal assistant approach. "We introduce Chorus, a system that enables realtime, two-way natural language conversation between an end user and a crowd acting as a single agent." So begins their paper, "Speaking with the Crowd," suggesting the ideal artificial chat partner is the partner that is actually the work of contributions from many crowdsourced workers. The researchers propose a crowd-powered chat system that behaves as an online collaborative interface. They believe it one-ups existing systems because it can take on more complex tasks.