In July, Uber released a new open-source AI library called the Plato research dialogue system. A couple of months ago, Cisco open-sourced its MindMeld conversational AI platform, after acquiring the company of the same name in 2017 for $125 million.
Why are so many new libraries being announced? There seems to be a trend of developers adopting open source conversational AI and leaving behind closed-source alternatives. Most of the key tooling for building conversational AI that has been developed in the last three years is open source. And companies like Uber and Cisco want to be in the running to define the standard conversational AI stack.
Companies are increasingly deciding that many of the AI capabilities they need are strategically important and should be developed in-house. By using open-source tools, they can build up their own training data sets and other IP, such as custom integrations with their backend systems. By developing the talent, data, and software to ship AI themselves, these companies control their own AI destiny.
While interest in closed-source tools like Dialogflow and Microsoft Bot Framework has stalled, monthly installations of the most popular open-source natural language understanding (NLU) libraries increased six-fold between mid-2018 and mid-2019.
More detail at https://venturebeat.com/2019/08/31/the-shift-toward-open-source-conversational-ai/
#AI #opensource
#^The shift toward open source conversational AI
Developers are adopting open source conversational AI and leaving behind closed-source alternatives to build more solutions in-house.