Conversational Web Interaction: Proposal of a Dialog-Based Natural Language Interaction Paradigm for the Web

This paper lays the foundation for a new delivery paradigm for web-accessible content and functionality, i.e., conversational interaction. Instead of asking users to read text, click through links and type on the keyboard, the vision is to enable users to “speak to a website” and to obtain natural language, spoken feedback. The paper describes how state-of-the-art chatbot technology can enable a dialog between the user and the website, proposes a reference architecture for the automated inference of site-specific chatbots able to mediate between the user and the website, and discusses open challenges and research questions. The envisioned, bidirectional dialog paradigm advances current screen reader technology and aims to benefit both regular users in eyes-free usage scenarios as well as visually impaired users in everyday scenarios.