Entrepreneur Jason Mars calls conversation our “first technology.” Before humans invented the wheel, crafted a spear or tamed fire, we mastered the superpower of talking to one another. That makes conversation an incredibly important tool. But if you’ve dealt with the automated chatbots deployed by the customer service arms of just about any big organization lately — whether banks or airlines — you also know how hard it can be to get it right. Deep learning AI and new techniques such as zero-shot learning promise to change that. On this episode of NVIDIA’s AI Podcast, host Noah Kravitz — whose intelligence is anything but artificial — spoke with Mars about how the latest AI techniques intersect with the very ancient art of conversation. In addition to being an entrepreneur and CEO of several startups, including Zero Shot Bot, Mars is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Michigan and the author of “Breaking Bots: Inventing a New Voice in the AI Revolution” (ForbesBooks, 2021).