A Roadmap for Conversational AI

As enterprise application users become comfortable with Conversational Interfaces (CI) in their personal lives—from Amazon Echo to Siri—the demand for natural language interfaces on enterprise applications is increasing. The range of options for developing systems with these Conversational Interfaces can be daunting for developers who are new to the theories and technologies underlying computational linguistics and machine learning. With that in mind, vendors are rushing to provide API-enabled Conversational Interface services and solutions that provide a level of abstraction to allow developers to focus on what they want to accomplish without worrying about how the tasks are getting done. In this note, we outline a process to help developers make the right choices when it is time to add a Conversational Interface to a new or existing application.