With recent advances in natural language understanding techniques and far-field microphone arrays, natural language interfaces, such as voice assistants and chatbots, are emerging as a popular new way to interact with computers.They have made their way out of the industry research labs and into the pockets, desktops, cars and living rooms of the general public. But although such interfaces recognize bits of natural language, and even voice input, they generally lac...

As voice interfaces and virtual assistants have moved out of the industry research labs and into the pockets, desktops and living rooms of the general public, a demand for a new kind of user experience (UX) design is emerging. Although the people are becoming familiar with Siri, Alexa, Cortana and others, their user experience is still characterized by short, command- or query-oriented exchanges, rather than longer, conversational ones. Limitations of the microphone and natural language pr...