The Topher Project
People who build everything from entertainment experiences to financial management face a dilemma: how can you scale what you’re building for broader consumption, yet maintain the personalization that makes it special? A fundamental tension exists between building something individualized, and scaling it to consumers such as visitors at a theme park, or gamers exploring the latest Zelda adventure. True disruption happens when we overcome the idea that one must sacrifice personalization to achieve mass production -- like it has in advertising, recommendations, and web search.
Artificial Intelligence practitioners, especially in natural language understanding, dialogue, and cognitive modeling, face the same issue: how can we personalize our models for all audiences without relying on unscalable efforts such as writing specific rules, building dialogue trees, or designing knowledge graphs? The Topher projcet aims to remove this dichotomy in order to create believable digital characters
This is a work in progress.