Holding a quality conversation

I just completed the book “The fine art of Small talk” by Debra Fine. This is a how-to on improving social conversation ability, an important but often overlooked skill, since most of our learning hours are spent on improving the core functional or technical areas.

It’s a huge inconvenience to end up with pregnant pauses while networking with strangers. It needs some effort to hold a quality conversation for over 15 minutes, beyond the customary introductions and basic questions.

After trying out some books which were either impractical or insincere, this book seemed just about right. Incidentally, looks like it isn’t just me who’s into this. Currently, there’s frenetic activity around teaching machines to be better conversationalists.

The Alexa Challenge

The $3.5 Million Challenge to teach Alexa have a quality social conversation for 20 minutes or more is currently on. This is an exciting challenge in the Conversational AI space. For a glimpse of the contest last year and how the winning chatbot engaged with humans, check out this interesting video.