Meet Meena, Google’s new chat companion for you

Voice-based assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Google’ Assistant, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana have become quite popular. However, all these smart assistants aren’t really conversational as such. Of course, they will tell you how the weather is, answer questions about the news, play songs but it’s not really conversational.
Google wants to change that with its new chat companion called Meena. According to a report by Venture Beat, Meena is a neural network that has about 2.6 billion parameters. “We present Meena, a multi-turn open-domain chatbot trained end-to-end on data mined and filtered from public domain social media conversations. This 2.6B parameter neural network is trained to minimize perplexity, an automatic metric that we compare against human judgement of multi-turn conversation quality,” said Google in a post. Google, however, hasn’t made it clear how and when can users actually interact with Meena.
The report further states that Meena is trained on 40 billion words. Meena, as per Venture Beat, uses a “seq2seq model and a variation of the popular Transformer architecture.”