Iris: A Conversational Agent for Complex Tasks

INTRODUCTION For decades, the promise of computers that communicate with us through natural language has been depicted in works of science fiction and driven research agendas in artificial intelligence (AI) and human-computer interaction (HCI). As early as 1964, Joseph Weizenbaum demonstrated how a computer program could hold open-ended conversations using a large set of pattern matching rules [45]. Terry Winograd later developed a more sophisticated program that could act upon natural language requests within a simplified “blocks world” [46]. In recent years, virtual assistants such as Siri and Cortana have increasingly applied conversational agents to real-world problems, such as finding local restaurants and scheduling calendar appointments [24].