Chorus: Letting the Crowd Speak with One Voice
Walter S. Lasecki, Anand P. Kulkarni, Rachel Wesley, Jeffrey W. Nichols, Chang Hu, James D. Allen, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2012
Autonomous systems cannot yet reliably engage in an open-ended dialogue with users due the complexity of natural language processing, but online crowds present new opportunities to do so. We introduce Chorus, a system enabling real-time two-way natural language conversation between an end user and a single virtual agent powered by a distributed crowd of online humans. Chorus maintains consistent, on-topic conversations with end users across multiple sessions even as individual members of the crowd come and go by storing a shared, curated dialogue history. While users see only a steady stream of dialogue with a single conversational partner, multiple crowd workers collaborate to select responses via an interface that allows them to rapidly scan conversational history, identify relevant parts of a conversation, and select between responses. Experiments show that dialogue with Chorus demonstrates conversational memory and interaction consistency, answering over 84% of all user queries correctly. More generally, Chorus demonstrates the ability of crowd-powered communication interfaces to serve as a robust alternative to virtual agents when interacting with software systems.