Abstract: The technology relates to conversational recommender systems (100) that employ a large language model (402) which can function as part of a dialogue manager (326). This can include receiving, by one or more processors implementing a conversational recommender system, user input via a client device during an interactive conversation (1502), then predicting, by the one or more processors, a dialogue state from the received user input according to a trained large language model (1504). The process may include generating a response to the received user input based on the predicted dialogue state and identifying a set of relevant items from a candidate corpus (1506). The process may also include generating a recommendation slate comprising one or more of the relevant items from the set (1510), and then optionally presenting the recommendation slate and an explanation about the recommendation slate to a user of the client device along with the response to the received user input (1512).

Abstract: Generally, the present disclosure is directed to methods and systems for automatically generating data that encodes natural language conversations between at least two parties. The conversational data may be automatically generated by one or more language generative models. As such, the automatically generated conversational data may be referred to as synthetic conversational data. The synthetic conversational data may simulate the speech patterns (e.g., prompts, responses to prompts, and combinations thereof) of one or more hypothetical or real humans (e.g., users) participating a conversation. In various applications, the synthetic conversational data is employed to train, pre-train, fine-tune, and/or evaluate the performance of at least one of the generative language models employed to generate the synthetic conversational data and/or other generative language models.

Abstract: Disclosed are methods and systems for automatically displaying media items (130) preselected by a user (110) on a collage display (700) located at a social gathering spot when the user is present. A user of the system sets up a personal online profile (110) through a website (100,200) and the profile identifies a portable device (500) associated with the user. User online profiles (110) are stored in a database (400) on a system web server (300), and may include selected media items (132) selected by the user. At a venue, the user's presence is automatically detected by various electronic means, and a personalized welcome message (702) may be displayed on the collage display screen (700) to notify other patrons of the venue. Users present may comment or vote (182,184) on the media items seen on the collage display, as well as send text messages to the display (164,750).