Conversational AI Explained

The idea of speaking to an intelligent agent and having a human-like conversation has intrigued and captivated the imagination for decades. In recent years, Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa have started to fulfill some of the promise of having a virtual assistant attend to basic tasks and simple information retrieval. However, when it comes to business applications the results have been less impressive. Text-based chatbots emerged with a limited range of success and true voice-based agents didn't fare much better than the old-style IVR phone-trees. What used to be "press 1 for yes", became "say'yes' for "yes".