FPI: Failure point isolation in large-scale conversational assistants

Large-scale conversational assistants such as Cortana, Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri process requests through a series of modules for wake word detection, speech recognition, language understanding and response generation. An error in one of these modules can cascade through the system. Given the large traffic volumes in these assistants, it is infeasible to manually analyze the data, identify requests with processing errors and isolate the source of error. We present a machine learning system to address this challenge. First, we embed the incoming request and context, such as system response and subsequent turns, using pretrained transformer models. Then, we combine these embeddings with encodings of additional metadata features (such as confidence scores from different modules in the online system) using a "mixing-encoder" to output the failure point predictions. Our system obtains 92.2% of human performance on this task while scaling to analyze the entire traffic in 8 different languages of a large-scale conversational assistant. We present detailed ablation studies analyzing the impact of different modeling choices.