Chatbots: The next generation in computer interfacing – A Review

Abstract

Computer interfacing is now moving towards more machine driven communications than the Command-line or graphical user Interfacing. HumanComputer speech through communication is now gaining momentum as a technique of computer interaction which paved the way for enormous developments using natural language processing. Such systems are precisely designed to simulate how a machine could behave as a conversational partner. A Chatbot is a computer program that stimulates intelligent human conversation using a natural language. This could be done through textual or auditory mechanisms. These Chatbots facilitates easier learning of the domain concepts and their interrelated relationships which make them efficient in the use of general applications. Chatbot architecture integrates a language model and computational algorithms to emulate informal chat communication between a human user and a computer using natural language. Recently, Chatbots techniques are widely used for various practical purposes and made available to the public. The objective of this paper is to review significant conversational agents that have been developed in Sri Lanka as well as in the other parts of the world for various domains over the past years. The development techniques, approaches and functionalities are pointed out through this paper.