Don't Believe the Hype!: White Lies of Conversational User Interface Creation Tools

Abstract

Following the initial hype and high expectations of conversational user interfaces (CUIs), a number of creation tools have emerged to simplify development of these complex systems. These have the potential to democratise and expand application development to those without programming skills. However, while such tools allow end-user developers to build language understanding and dialog management capability into a CUI application, actually fulfilling or executing an action still requires programmatic API integration. In this paper, we look at how CUI builders that claim to be "no code required" struggle to yield more than toy examples, with an aim to provoke the community to develop better tools for CUI creation.