GauchoChat: Towards proactive, controllable, and personalized social conversation
2023
In this paper, we introduce GauchoChat, a social bot developed for the Amazon Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 5. Leveraging recent advances in generative language models as the primary response generator, GauchoChat introduces three main innovative solutions that lead to proactive, controllable, and personalized conversational interactions, ultimately improving user experience and satisfaction. GauchoChat introduces a LLM-based Promptist to dynamically select a set of prompting strategies based on the current user intent, persona, and emotion, resulting in use-specific responses for high-quality user engagement. Additionally, GauchoChat explores a proactive topic switching mechanism for transitioning from reactive conversations to proactive engagement with users. The proposed topic switching module intelligently determines when to switch conversation topics and integrates externally-sourced materials into the conversation. Finally, we developed real-time image retrieval to display image contents on multimodal Alexa devices. By implementing these solutions, GauchoChat ensures that its conversations remain engaging, diverse, and well-informed, fostering a proactive dialogue experience. In this paper, we present the system design and architecture of the socialbot system GauchoChat developed for the Amazon Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 5, as well as the evaluations to demonstrate its effectiveness.