Artificial Conversational Companions A Requirements Analysis

This paper is based on several attempts to provide a definition of an Artificial Companion that can be found in the referenced literature. Although accepted by the research community, such descriptions set very high expectations of such agents, but they do not address the technical feasibility and the system limitations, that is why they need an elaborated and precise explanation. In this paper, we focus on computer agents that simulate human language behaviour, and are aimed to serve, to assist and to accompany their owner over a long period of time, that we call Artificial Conversational Companions. This is the first approach to analyse the effort required to meet the expectations of Artificial Conversational Companion and discuss the identified design issues.