ABSTRACT
Customer conversation or dialog systems are a technology aimed at sustaining conversations with users that could be considered natural and human-like. Proactiveness is necessary for computers to stop being considered tools and as real conversational partners instead. This chapter starts with an introduction to the approach of human interaction management, which was developed to deal with the human behavior in the organization. It focuses on ideas not only from process theory but also from biology, psychology, social systems theory, and learning theory. The chapter presents the concept of interaction or interactive pattern as a sequence of actions, references, and reactions wherein each reference or reaction has a certain, ex-ante intended and ex-post recognizable interrelation with preceding event in terms of timing and content. It discusses the components of effective customer interaction systems, namely, automatic speech recognition, spoken language understanding, dialog management, natural language generation, and text-to-speech synthesis.
