A Survey of Published Literature on Conversational Artificial Intelligence

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI), as a rapidly emerging technology, has made a huge impact in the fields of e-commerce, education, entertainment, health, journalism and productivity, and thus arousing the interest of governments, businesses and research institutions. Therefore, it is necessary to generate an overview of the recent developments in the field in order to plan further study effectively. To achieve the goal, we analyze the conversational AI literature between 2015 and 2020 with CiteSpace, which is used for the systematic evaluation of the knowledge structures. Based on the results of the analysis, we find the following insights: (1) The evolution of conversational AI research involves many categories while two major disciplines—computer science and ergonomics—lead the way. (2) The current research can be divided into two research areas: underlying technology architecture and smart scene applications. By using multiple complementary scientometric methods, our study visually presents the research history, current research hotspots and emerging trends in the field of conversational AI, to further promote its technology and application research.