Conversational AI: How Does it Work and Where it Is Headed?

Current chatbots tend to be awkward and even agonizing to use, limited to answering a set of simple queries -- often incorrectly. But what if a chatbot could be designed to support more complex and multistep tasks, such as organizing a daily schedule or pinpointing a fault lurking inside a complex mechanical device? Conversational AI technology promises all of this and more. Conversational AI is built on natural language processing (NLP) and other machine learning (ML) technologies, with the goal of enabling human-like interactions between machines and people. So far, conversational AI has mostly been used to create sophisticated chatbots -- as opposed to scripted, rules-based chatbots.