The Role of Conversational Interfaces in the Future of Digitaland Technology

Abstract: Conversational interfaces (CIs) have been a trending topic in recent years. As of the last decade, CIs have emerged with the aim of simplifying human-machine interactions and found a wide use case in the market. For example, Siri and Google Assistant are some of the most well-known CIs developed by the tech giants Apple and Google. The digital landscape has evolved from web, to mobile apps, to recently CIs. Nowadays, CIs, in particular chatbots and voicebots, are becoming increasingly common. Whether navigating the web or messaging on a phone, it is likely that CIs have been confronted offering the user help.However, CIs have not managed to reach a large-scale use. Furthermore, the reasons regarding the challenges faced by CIs as well as their usability are not greatly explored. In this thesis, we explore the most relevant uses of CIs and the reasons hindering a widespread use of CIs. Our goal is to provide an insight into CIs’ uses and list the reasons regarding the challenges faced by CIs. The research study followed a mixed method approach connecting an explorative qualitative literature study, a survey and an interview. The data was collected by using a systematic mapping approach for it being more suitable for conducting an effective literature review. The survey and the interview were conducted in order to confirm the findings.According to our research, it was found that the most common use cases of CIs were in customer service, sales, travel and bookings, education, healthcare and as voice assistants. The most prominent challenges faced by CIs were poor usability, language processing and understanding, speech recognition and natural language generation and security and privacy. As a conclusion, the future looks promising for CIs, however, they need to be furher researched and developed in order to help them reach a widespread use in the future.