The 3 next steps in conversational AI

Conversational AI is a subfield of artificial intelligence focused on producing natural and seamless conversations between humans and computers. We've seen several amazing advances on this front in recent years, with significant improvements in automatic speech recognition (ASR), text to speech (TTS), and intent recognition, as well as the rocketship growth of voice assistant devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, with estimates of close to 100 million devices in homes in 2018. But we're still a long way away from the fluent human-machine conversation promised in science fiction. Here are some key advances we should see over the next decade that could get us closer to that long-term vision. Machine learning, and in particular deep learning, has become an extremely popular technique within the field of AI over the past few years.