Sounding Board: A User-Centric and Content-Driven Social Chatbot

TL;DR

Sounding Board is a social chatbot designed for user-centric, content-driven interactions, leveraging large-scale real-world conversation data to improve engagement and performance.

Contribution

The paper introduces Sounding Board, a novel social chatbot architecture emphasizing user-centric and content-driven design, validated through extensive real-world conversation logs.

Findings

Achieved success in the 2017 Amazon Alexa Prize

Analyzed 160,000 real-world user conversations

Demonstrated improved user engagement and system robustness

Abstract

We present Sounding Board, a social chatbot that won the 2017 Amazon Alexa Prize. The system architecture consists of several components including spoken language processing, dialogue management, language generation, and content management, with emphasis on user-centric and content-driven design. We also share insights gained from large-scale online logs based on 160,000 conversations with real-world users.