Conversational Agent: Difference between revisions

A ''conversational agent'', or better , a ''conversational system'', is a computer system intended to converse with a human in a natural langue.

Let's see what wikipedia states for conversational agent:

''A dialogue system, or conversational agent (CA), is a computer system intended to converse with a human. Dialogue systems employed one or more of text, speech, graphics, haptics, gestures, and other modes for communication on both the input and output channel.''<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogue_system</ref>.

In common practice, conversational agent in an umbrella term generally used as synonym of chatbot, even if a chatbot is a conversational agent that communicate just via texts, on chat-based platforms (as instant-messaging mobile apps).  

Especially in academic parlance, the term conversational agent was synonym of chatbot, and the reason emphasis on the "agent" was maybe because conversational agents was considered a special application in intelligent systems<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_agent</ref> or Multi-agent systems<ref>/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-agent_system</ref> research.

The term "agent" is probably misleading, because assimilating any conversational system as an agent that mediate between an end-user (e.g. a consumer of a business platform) and a business human operator. That's in general not true. Instead the agentive role is commonly related to a special case of conversational system that act as intermediator, requiring a final conversation with a human operator (that's commonly called, in customer service realms:  ''human-in-the-loop'').    

But there are many cases where the conversational system is not properly an agent, by example in pure [[command-and-control]] conversational systems that just execute automation commands to action (electro-mechanical) actuators, by example in [[home-automation]] or industrial automation realms.  

Nevertheless the concept of "conversational agent", even if ambiguous, is currently an active area of research of [[virtual assistants]], in the sense of a real agentive/automation technology that assists humans to solve real-life problems, in real-time in a reactive and proactive way (co called [[mixed-initiative]]). [[Voice assistants]] are a special case of virtual assistants<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_assistant</ref>, where the human-computer interaction is mainly done via voice ([[voicefirst]]). [[Smartspeakers]] are HW device terminals that enable humans to interact with a (voice) assistant.