Google has announced that it's working on an improved version of its conversational AI model, LaMDA 2, and to test it out, it's launching an app called AI Test Kitchen. As Google explains it, conversational language models aren't quite where we'd like them to be yet, so the AI Test Kitchen is designed to specifically test the capabilities of LaMDA to interpret and respond to natural language.

AI Test Kitchen will launch with three demos of how Google is improving its conversational AI models, and they all have different purposes. They're called Imagine it, List It, and Talk About It. Because these are just tests, you can expect to see some answers you might not like, but for every reply LaMDA gives you, you can give feedback to help tune it further.

Imagine It

First, there's Imagine It, a demo where you can give the app a prompt that starts with "Imagine if...". You can enter anything you want here, and the LaMDA model will reply with a detailed description of what you might expect to see or feel in the situation you described. For example, you can ask it to imagine the deepest part of the ocean, and the model will respond with a description of what you might see in Mariana's Trench.

You can then follow this with more questions to get increasingly detailed descriptions that further capture the essence of the situation you want to imagine.

List it

List It is another interesting demo where you feed LaMDA an idea for something you want to do, such as planting a vegetable garden or moving to a new location. With this initial prompt, the AI Test Kitchen app will generate a to-do list of steps you might want to take in order to achieve that goal. By breaking it down into sub-tasks, it should make it easier to be prepared for that objective.

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You can also re-run the original prompt again to get even more ideas for things you might want to do to achieve that goal. For this one, Google is looking for feedback on how well the AI model can suggest steps you might not have originally thought of.

Talk About It

Finally, the last demo is meant to target a specific challenge conversational AI models have, which is staying on the topic of a conversation. This demo challenges the user to start talking about a topic, such as dogs, and then try to deviate from it. The point here is to see how well LaMDA can redirect the conversation back to the original topic.

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If you're hoping to test this out yourself, you may need to wait a while longer. Google says it's opening up the AI Test Kitchen app to small groups of people and expanding over time, so you may not be part of that group right away. You can learn more about the app here.