Conversational Agent Concepts

Below, you’ll find a list of concepts students can learn about conversational agents.

Note: The triangles (►) below are expandable/collapsable 🙂

Note: ConvoBlocks is also known as the MIT App Inventor Conversational Agent Platform (MAICAP)

Note: In the section with concepts organized by activity, the concepts in [square brackets] were taught in previous activities, but built upon further in the associated activity (e.g., ConvoBlocks first taught “events”, and Convo built upon the event concept, so under the Convo bullet, [events] is in square brackets)

Conversational Agent Concept Framework, Organized by Category

• Natural Language Understanding
• Conversation Representation
• Dialog Management
• Data Access and Conversation Context
• Human-Agent Interaction

Conversational Agent Concept Framework, Organized by Activity

• Zhorai
• ConvoBlocks
• Convo
• Alexa Developer Console
• Dialogflow CX

Conversational Agent Design Recommendations

Below, you’ll find a list of design recommendations developers (including students) can use to create effective conversational agents.

Based on Murad et al.’s Design guidelines for hands-free speech interaction