Classification

Conversational user interfaces have found themselves applied in various scenarios. Their applications can be classified broadly into two categories: enterprise assistants and personal assistants.

Enterprise Assistants are chatbots and other conversational user interfaces that are modeled after customer service representatives and store assistants. Just like human customer service representatives, the bots engage customers in conversation carrying out marketing, sales, and support tasks. Most chatbots deployed on channels such as Facebook Messenger, Skype, Slack, and many more are enterprise assistants. They are designed and built to do tasks that store assistants and customer service representatives would do. Enterprise assistants are being developed in many business sectors, automating a variety of conversational tasks.

On the other hand, personal assistants are bots like Alexa, Siri, and Cortana, which act as a user's personal assistant, doing tasks such as managing a calendar, sending texts, taking calls, and playing music. These personal assistants can be extended in terms of their capabilities. For instance, Alexa allows for such augmentation by letting developers build skills that users can choose to add to their own Alexa. Brands can, therefore, develop skills for Alexa or actions for Google Assistant that will enable Alexa and Assistant to interact with the brand's IT services and perform tasks such as placing orders, checking delivery status, and many more. For instance, popular brands like PizzaHut, Starbucks, and Domino's have developed skills that can be enabled on Alexa.