Fall 2021: Conversational Artificial Intelligence

The science and art of creating conversational AI spans multiple areas in computer science. Learning about and leveraging advances in these areas to create state-of-the art conversational virtual assistants is the central focus of this course. Throughout the course, students will put into practice the end-to-end creation of a virtual assistant spanning natural language processing, dialogue management, response generation, and other applications. Students will also use tools that span both traditional techniques as well as cutting edge techniques for these AI with the goal of creating new experiences that go beyond existing virtual assistants. Students will be tasked with integrating the AI experiences they create with a set real APIs of their choosing (e.g., Spotify, Fitbit, Unity, etc.). The project culminates in a demo day where creations are shared for others to try, for this semester, these public demos will take the form of video submissions that will be posted on the course website.