88 AI MAGAZINE
One of the most exciting emerging areas of research in AI today involves the study and development of what I will refer to as holistic systems. These are AI systems
that involve an end-to-end integration of many computa-
tional elements composing various stages of perception, lan-
guage, cognition, and action. One, sort of canonical, exam-
ple of such a holistic system, would be a cognitive robot in
which these stages of computation were grounded in the real
world (Ortiz 2016). Such holistic systems are to be contrast-
ed with narrower systems that employ a much smaller num-
ber of elements (say, a natural language interface to a data-
base) and in which design considerations are not as
challenging.
As virtual personal assistants (VPAs) become more capable,
Copyright © 2018, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved. ISSN 0738-4602
AI In Industry Column
Holistic Conversational
Assistants
Charles L. Ortiz, Jr.
; This column describes work being
done at Nuance Communications in
developing virtual personal assistants
(VPAs) that can engage in extended
task-centered dialogues and that involve
the coordination of many complex modules, along with conversational and collaborative support to such VPAs.
