On Chatbots Exhibiting Goal-Directed Autonomy in Dynamic Environments

Conversation interfaces (CIs), or chatbots, are a popular form of intelligent agents that engage humans in taskoriented or informal conversation. In this position paper and demonstration, we argue that chatbots working in dynamic environments, like with sensor data, can not only serve as a promising platform to research issues at the intersection of learning, reasoning, representation and execution for goal-directed autonomy; but also handle non-trivial business applications. We explore the underlying issues in the context of Water Advisor, a preliminary multi-modal conversation system that can access and explain water quality data.