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Conversational Interfaces: Past and Present

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The Conversational Interface

Abstract

Conversational interfaces have a long history, starting in the 1960s with text-based dialog systems for question answering and chatbots that simulated casual conversation. Speech-based dialog systems began to appear in the late 1980s and spoken dialog technology became a key area of research within the speech and language communities. At the same time commercially deployed spoken dialog systems, known in the industry as voice user interfaces (VUI), began to emerge. Embodied conversational agents (ECA) and social robots were also being developed. These systems combine facial expression, body stance, hand gestures, and speech in order to provide a more human-like and more engaging interaction. In this chapter we review developments in spoken dialog systems, VUI, embodied conversational agents, social robots, and chatbots, and outline findings and achievements from this work that will be important for the next generation of conversational interfaces.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  2. 2.

    http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  3. 3.

    https://www.chatbots.org/virtual_assistant/anna3/. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  4. 4.

    http://www.clt.gu.se/research/maharani. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  5. 5.

    http://www.google.com/instant/. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  6. 6.

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/inprotk/. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  7. 7.

    http://www.speech.kth.se/prod/publications/files/3654.pdf. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  8. 8.

    https://sourceforge.net/projects/dylan/. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  9. 9.

    http://www.voicexml.org/about/frequently-asked-questions. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  10. 10.

    https://evolution.voxeo.com/. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  11. 11.

    https://cafe.bevocal.com/. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  12. 12.

    http://www.pandorabots.com/. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  13. 13.

    http://chatscript.sourceforge.net/. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  14. 14.

    http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/projects/companions/. Accessed February 2016.

  15. 15.

    http://www.semaine-project.eu/. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  16. 16.

    http://lirec.eu/project. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  17. 17.

    http://www.chrisfp7.eu/index.html. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  18. 18.

    http://www.speechtek.com. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  19. 19.

    http://mobilevoiceconference.com/. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  20. 20.

    http://www.speechtechmag.com/. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  21. 21.

    https://youtu.be/RRYj0SMhfH0. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  22. 22.

    https://youtu.be/6zcByHMw4jk. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  23. 23.

    https://youtu.be/lHfLr1MF7DI. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  24. 24.

    https://youtu.be/rYF68t4O_Xw. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  25. 25.

    https://youtu.be/vphmJEpLXU0. Accessed February 19, 2016.

  26. 26.

    http://www.masswerk.at/elizabot/. Accessed February 19, 2016.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing and Mathematics, Ulster University, Northern Ireland, UK

    Michael McTear

  2. ETSI Informática y Telecomunicación, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    Zoraida Callejas

  3. Department of Computer Science, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    David Griol

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  1. Michael McTear
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  2. Zoraida Callejas
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Correspondence to Michael McTear .

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McTear, M., Callejas, Z., Griol, D. (2016). Conversational Interfaces: Past and Present. In: The Conversational Interface. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32967-3_4

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