Voice assistants are becoming central to our lives. The convenience of using voice assistants to do simple tasks has created an industry for voice-enabled devices like TVs, thermostats, air conditioners, etc. It has also improved the quality of life of elders by making the world more accessible. Voice assistants engage in task-oriented dialogues using machine-learned language understanding models. However, training deep-learned models take a lot of training data, which is time-consuming and expensive. Furthermore, it is even more problematic if we want the voice assistant to understand hundreds of languages. In this paper, we present a zero-shot deep learning algorithm that uses only the English part of the Massive dataset and achieves a high level of accuracy across 51 languages. The algorithm uses a delexicalized translation model to generate multilingual data for data augmentation. The training data is further weighted to improve the accuracy of the worst-performing languages. We report on our experiments with code-switching, word order, multilingual ensemble methods, and other techniques and their impact on overall accuracy.

Most chatbot literature that focuses on improving the fluency and coherence of a chatbot, is dedicated to making chatbots more human-like. However, very little work delves into what really separates humans from chatbots – humans intrinsically understand the effect their responses have on the interlocutor and often respond with an intention such as proposing an optimistic view to make the interlocutor feel better. This paper proposes an innovative framework to train chatbots to possess human-like intentions. Our framework includes a guiding chatbot and an interlocutor model that plays the role of humans. The guiding chatbot is assigned an intention and learns to induce the interlocutor to reply with responses matching the intention, for example, long responses, joyful responses, responses with specific words, etc. We examined our framework using three experimental setups and evaluated the guiding chatbot with four different metrics to demonstrate flexibility and performance advantages. Additionally, we performed trials with human interlocutors to substantiate the guiding chatbot’s effectiveness in influencing the responses of humans to a certain extent. Code will be made available to the public.