Conversational Interface

The term Conversational Interface refers to a program interface that communicates with human users via chat.

Typical usage

The term Conversational Interface is typically used by artificial intelligence scientists and researchers who are engaged in various human-computer interaction projects and research in agent-based interfaces, particularly those with anthropomorphic appearance.

A great example of a Conversational Interface is “Articulate”. It is a system that applies natural language processing and machine learning techniques in the area of data visualization and analysis. Its goal is to automatically translate natural language queries into meaningful representations of data. It constitutes a part of Project Lifelike - a research initiative to provide a more natural alternative for interacting with computers conducted in Electronic Visualisation Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

By designing interfaces that are more immersive, more intelligent, and more interactive, the human-machine systems become more responsive to people’s needs and actions. The video below shows Dr. Pattie Maes presenting a project Sixth Sense realised by the Fluid Interfaces Group. It is a research group at MIT which goal is to radically rethink the human-machine interactive experience. This video gives you clear vision on their thoughts of the term Conversational Interface.

Conversational Interface may aid in robot navigation and can be used as a conversational control system for a group of robots. Marjorie Skubic, a computer scientist at the University of Missouri College of Engineering, has demonstrated a prototype robot that can read sketches drawn on a PDA and then execute a proposed path. Learn more by reading Conversational interface aids robot navigation, an article posted in EE Times.

Background

The term Conversational Interface is a composite of two words: conversational and interface.

The word conversation signifies the spoken exchange of thoughts, opinions, and feelings; talk. It originates from Latin word conversationem (nominativus conversatio) meaning “act of living with”.^[1]

The word interface originates from 1962, from submission of two words: inter and face.

Inter originates from Latin and means “among, between”, from Proto-Indo-European (the hypothetical reconstructed ancestral language of the Indo-European family) enter - “between, among” (compare with Sanskrit antar, Old Persian antar, Greek entera, Old Irish eter, Old Welsh ithr, Gothic undar, Old English under), a comparative of en- meaning “in”.^[2]

The word face originates from late XIII century meaning “front of the head”, from Old French face - “face, countenance, look, appearance”, from Vulgar Latin facia, facies - “appearance, form, figure”, and secondarily “visage, countenance”, probably related to facere - “to make”. The word face replaced Old English word andwlita (from root of wlitan - “to see, look”) and ansyn, the usual word (from the root of seon - “see”). In French, the use of face for “front of the head” was given up in XVII century, and replaced by visage (older vis), from Latin visus - “sight”.^[3]

The term interface means a point of interaction or communication between a computer and any other entity, such as a printer or human operator.^[4]

The term Conversational Interface has been used since the 1980s, most likely after Edwin Hutchins in his paper Metaphors for interface design described Conversational Interface (e.g. command line), being a metaphor of a conversation, that functions as an implied intermediary between the machine and user, modelled after human-human conversations.