Speaking With The Crowd

Automated systems are not yet able to engage in a robust dialogue with users due the complexity and ambiguity of natural language. However, humans can easily converse with one another and maintain a shared history of past interactions. In this paper, we introduce Chorus, a system that enables real-time, two-way natural language conversation between an end user and a crowd acting as a single agent. Chorus is capable of maintaining a consistent, on-topic conversation with end users across multiple sessions, despite constituent individuals perpetually joining and leaving the crowd. This is enabled by using a curated shared dialogue history.Even though crowd members are constantly providing input, we present users with a stream of dialogue that appears to be from a single conversational partner. Experiments demonstrate that dialogue with Chorus displays elements of conversational memory and interaction consistency. Workers were able to answer 84.6% of user queries correctly, demonstrating that crowd-powered communication interfaces can serve as a robust means of interacting with software systems.