CAI Terminology
Conversational AI (CAI): The product of applying AI principles, techniques, and tools to improve conversational interfaces like chatbots.
CAI (pronounced “kai” and rhyming with “bye”) is the best term we have to encompass a great new world of business automation based on AI and NLP. It may start with a simple conversational interface to a small application, like a rule-based pizza-ordering chatbot. In the end, I predict that that it will expand well beyond that for many notable businesses. There are two reasons— two forces that will drive the expansion of CAI. First, the user’s expectations of human-level conversational skills will incentivize CAI developers to expand the artificial intelligence capabilities of their agents beyond NLP because there is no other way to provide a convincing dialog without it. Second, the myriad threads of business automation that have been growing separately and independently for years will naturally come together to support that need for intelligence; they will most naturally become unified behind the business’ most ubiquitous interface with its customer: CAI.
Below I group CAI-related terms into two classes. Primary terminology contains terms that I believe always indicate CAI is atopic wherever they appear. Secondary terminology contains terms that are useful in understanding CAI but may be used in topics outside of CAI as well.
CAI Primary Terminology
AI Chatbot: A chatbot powered by AI. See “chatbot”.
Chatbot: a software application that provides a conversational interface for human users to interact with it. For some people, the term “chatbot” connotes a use of less-sophisticated approaches excluding AI, machine learning, and NLP. For others, the term is more inclusive.
Chit-Chat Dialog System: A conversation agent able to participate in a high-level, open-ended conversation on any general topic (open-domain).
Conversational Agent: Like a chatbot but with the connotation of being built on principles of artificial intelligence agents. Also called dialog agent.
Conversational Commerce (c-commerce): using conversational AI in commerce or especially in e-commerce.
Conversational Service Automation (CSA)
Conversational UI (CUI): The design and development of a human-computer interface based on conversational AI as a practice comparable in discipline to the design and development of a graphical user interface (GUI) and other forms of computer interface.
Conversational Interface: As far as I am aware, “conversational interface” is synonymous with “Conversational UI (CUI)”.
Dialog Agent: Also called conversational agent.
Dialog State Tracking (DST): A module in a dialog agent that infers the belief state or user goal from dialog history.
Dialog System: A computer system designed to interact with human users via natural language dialog. There are a few different kinds, including task-oriented and chit-chat dialog systems.
Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA)
Natural Language Generation (NLG): A module in a dialog agent responsible for generating utterances as output from each turn of dialog.
Natural Language Understanding (NLU): A module in a dialog agent responsible for understanding user utterances. This model typically performs intent recognition (utterance text classification) and slot-filling (named entity recognition and resolution).
Session: A dialog fragment about one topic.
Task-oriented Dialog System (Task Bot): A chatbot or virtual assistant that helps a user reach a goal within a specific task domain such as booking a hotel, learning about the weather, etc. Also called Goal-oriented Dialog System. There are two types of task bot based on architecture: (1) pipeline of separate modules and (2) single end-to-end model. Here is an overview of recent advances up to 2021.
Virtual Assistant (VA)
Virtual Customer Assistant (VCA)
Virtual enterprise assistant (VEA): Conversational interfaces for employees to simplify their access and engagement with the enterprise and its systems.
Virtual personal assistant (VPA): Generalist assistants for users that broker first-, second-, or third-party services and knowledge, commonly deployed on consumer or dedicated devices.
Virtual support agent (VSA): Assistants that provide IT support and assistance in collaboration with the IT service desk. They pull information from knowledge management sources and an ITSM tool to provide answers to common questions. They extend chatbot capabilities by also taking action on behalf of the business user to do things like reset passwords, deploy software, escalate support requests and carry out changes to restore IT services.
CAI Secondary Terminology
Interactive Voice Response (IVR): an automated phone system technology allowing incoming callers to access information via a voice response system of pre recorded messages without having to speak to a human agent, as well as to utilize menu options via touch tone keypad selection or speech recognition to have their call routed to specific departments or specialists.
Natural language processing (NLP): The branch of artificial intelligence (which is a branch of computer science) that focuses on human language comprehension, generation, and other forms of manipulation and use.
