Abstract
Chatbots are increasingly becoming important gateways to digital services and information—taken up within domains such as customer service, health, education, and work support. However, there is only limited knowledge concerning the impact of chatbots at the individual, group, and societal level. Furthermore, a number of challenges remain to be resolved before the potential of chatbots can be fully realized. In response, chatbots have emerged as a substantial research area in recent years. To help advance knowledge in this emerging research area, we propose a research agenda in the form of future directions and challenges to be addressed by chatbot research. This proposal consolidates years of discussions at the CONVERSATIONS workshop series on chatbot research. Following a deliberative research analysis process among the workshop participants, we explore future directions within six topics of interest: (a) users and implications, (b) user experience and design, (c) frameworks and platforms, (d) chatbots for collaboration, (e) democratizing chatbots, and (f) ethics and privacy. For each of these topics, we provide a brief overview of the state of the art, discuss key research challenges, and suggest promising directions for future research. The six topics are detailed with a 5-year perspective in mind and are to be considered items of an interdisciplinary research agenda produced collaboratively by avid researchers in the field.
Highlights
Chatbots are conversational agents providing access to information and services through interaction in everyday language
We propose a research agenda which has been distilled through a series of dedicated workshops on chatbot research—CONVERSATIONS—with intensive discussions among researchers and practitioners actively working on chatbots
To demarcate the research area driven by the industrial uptake of conversational computer systems, and to signify the attention of this area towards emerging patterns of use, as well as broader business and societal implications, we refer to this area as chatbot research
Summary
Chatbots are conversational agents providing access to information and services through interaction in everyday language. The rapidly growing body of chatbot research has a marked interdisciplinary character—spanning fields such as informatics, management and marketing, media and communication science, linguistics and philosophy, psychology and sociology, engineering, design, and human-computer interaction This broad emerging knowledge base is valuable, and implies that research of relevance to chatbots is currently fragmented across disciplines and application domains. As the research on chatbots is rapidly evolving, we hold that deriving a research agenda from collaborations and discussions among avid researchers and practitioners, who keep abreast of the ongoing developments of the area, is a more effective approach as compared, for example, with a mapping study or systematic literature review This collaborative approach enables us to gain insights from different perspectives to address opportunities, challenges, and perceived research needs within the field.
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