Goal Orientated Conversational Agents — The rocky road to commercialization

Academics who wish to commercialise a novel research concept or prototype `product´ face many difficult challenges. These typically include limited business knowledge, the technical verses business language barrier, and the time commitment involved in trying to “sell” the idea to industry and develop one-off prototypes. This paper describes the commercialisation of Goal Orientated Conversational Agents (GO-CA) from initial research concepts through to establishing a UK limited company. GO-CAs have the ability to converse with humans through the use of natural language dialogue in order to achieve a specific task. Such systems are ideal for providing clear and consistent advice 24 hours a day and allow the users to be able to ask questions in natural language which are relevant to their personal situation. The paper briefly describes the novel GO-CA architecture and outlines two developed applications. The pathway to commercialisation which was taken is described and lessons which were learnt are identified.