Stephanie2: Thinking, Waiting, and Making Decisions Like Humans in Step-by-Step AI Social Chat
This work addresses the issue of unnatural pacing in AI social chat for users, but it is incremental as it builds upon previous systems like Stephanie1.
The paper tackled the problem of unnatural message pacing in step-by-step AI social chat by proposing Stephanie2, which introduces active waiting and message-pace adaptation, resulting in improved naturalness and engagement metrics and a higher pass rate in human evaluation Turing tests.
Instant-messaging human social chat typically progresses through a sequence of short messages. Existing step-by-step AI chatting systems typically split a one-shot generation into multiple messages and send them sequentially, but they lack an active waiting mechanism and exhibit unnatural message pacing. In order to address these issues, we propose Stephanie2, a novel next-generation step-wise decision-making dialogue agent. With active waiting and message-pace adaptation, Stephanie2 explicitly decides at each step whether to send or wait, and models latency as the sum of thinking time and typing time to achieve more natural pacing. We further introduce a time-window-based dual-agent dialogue system to generate pseudo dialogue histories for human and automatic evaluations. Experiments show that Stephanie2 clearly outperforms Stephanie1 on metrics such as naturalness and engagement, and achieves a higher pass rate on human evaluation with the role identification Turing test.