Talking A-'bot AFRICA

Where does the continent fit into the chatbot conversation, and why it needs its own startups that focus on AI.

- Tiana Cline

The ability to be able to have a conversation with someone else is a fundamental part of what it means to be a human being but today, it’s becoming more and more confusing to figure out whether you’re talking to a bot… or not.

Technology has advanced to the point where AI-powered conversational chatbots, like ChatGPT or Meta’s BlenderBot 3, are deceptively realistic. (More so when they go off the rails and say things like ‘I want to be alive’, which is exactly what Bing’s AI bot expressed earlier this year.) While chatbots like these are trained to avoid expressing personal or biased views, and are known to make factual mistakes and mix up information, they’re becoming smarter, more streamlined and sometimes, a little strange…

“Conversational AI is one of the first applications of NLP in artificial intelligence and this kind of technology has existed since Eliza in the sixties,” explains Professor Mpho Raborife, the deputy director at the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.

Natural Language Processing, or NLP, is a way for computers to understand human language. NLP uses AI tools like machine learning and neural networks to process and interpret large amounts of data.

“With the rise of big data, ChatGPT was inevitable. It’s trained on a very large dataset and the technologies behind it make it a lot more advanced than other conversational AI applications.”