The Evolution of Conversational Agents: From Clippy to ChatGPT and Beyond

While conversational agents have existed in various forms for many decades, they have come a long way since their inception. In this workshop, we will embark on an exciting journey through the evolution of conversation agents. We will begin in the ’60s with the advent of chatbots which utilized keyword-recognition and rule-based systems to address limited user inputs. From there, we will cover the remarkable advancements in statistical computing and large language modeling that have made the transformer-based dialogue systems of today possible. Ultimately, this workshop will highlight fundamental technical developments and provide a rudimentary understanding of the past, present, and potential future of conversational agents.