Chatbots and recommendations
Chatbots answer in words by predicting what should come next. Recommendation systems suggest videos, songs or products by predicting what you might like from what you and similar people chose before.
📌 Key points
- A chatbot is a program you can chat with by typing or speaking.
- Modern chatbots learn from huge amounts of text. They write answers by predicting, again and again, what word is likely to come next.
- A chatbot can sound clever and confident, but it does not understand like a person, and it can be wrong.
- A recommendation system suggests things you might like: videos, songs, books or products.
- It uses data about what you watched, liked, skipped or bought, and what people with similar choices liked.
- Recommendations can help you find good things, but they can also keep showing you more of the same and keep you watching for longer.
- You are in charge: you can choose something different, take breaks and switch off.
📖 Key words
- Chatbot
- A program you can have a conversation with by typing or speaking.
- Prompt
- The question or instruction you type into a chatbot.
- Predict
- To make a good guess about what comes next, based on patterns.
- Recommendation
- A suggestion of something you might like.
- Recommendation system
- A program that suggests things by predicting what you might like.
✏️ Worked example
Lana watches three videos about volcanoes. Why does the app then suggest more volcano videos?
- The app records data: Lana watched three volcano videos to the end.
- It finds a pattern: people who watched those videos often also watched other videos about volcanoes and earthquakes.
- It predicts that Lana will like similar videos and suggests them.
- This can be helpful, but if she only sees volcano videos she might miss other interesting topics.
- Answer: the app predicts what she will like from her data and other people's choices. Lana can still choose something different.
Remember: a chatbot predicts likely words, and a recommendation system predicts what you might like. Predictions can be wrong, so you stay in charge.
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