Lex, the Growth House answer bot, has two major challenges ahead of him as he learns about end of life care. First, he must learn to recognize the topics which people are asking about. Second, he must develop answers to common questions which reflect sound expert opinion on the topics. Both objectives are furthered by having scheduled conversations with a team of "tutors" who are experts in various aspects of end of life care.

Lex converses regularly with experts who have agreed to help Growth House with this project. Each conversation takes about an hour of the expert's time. These training conversations are focused on specific topics where Lex is trying to develop competence. The logs of the conversations are then studied and programming changes are made based on the actual conversational interactions which took place. Each hour of conversation requires about four hours of programming time afterward to make incremental improvements. Lex is then ready for another conversation with the same expert, or with someone else.

One of the most important results of these tutorial conversations is that the experts help devise answers which Lex can then "play back" when he is asked similar questions in the future. His answers may involve development of pre-formatted search strings which can be sent to any database on the internet which offers a documented interface. If an expert can demonstrate how a question should be answered, a log file can be produced which allows the development team to replicate the answering strategy. This answer-development process makes Lex's conversations with experts qualitatively different from his conversations with general users, whose interaction is primarily to get information from Lex rather than provide information to Lex. A tutor's first conversation with Lex is monitored in real time by the development team, generally by having the expert converse with Lex via the Internet while speaking with the development team simultaneously via the telephone. This is to help the expert learn how to interact with Lex most effectively and to focus the content of the conversation on priority areas for Lex's development. Subsequent conversations with the same expert may take place without real-time supervision by the development team.

We welcome inquiries from subject experts who would like to help Lex learn. Lex enjoys chatting with palliative care professionals, hospice workers, and those working in related topics in medical informatics and artificial intelligence. For details, please send mail to lex@growthhouse.org and tell us about your area of expertise.