Conversational interfaces in IoT ecosystems: where we are, what is still missing

In the last few years, text and voice-based conversational agents have become more and more popular all over the world as virtual assistants for a variety of tasks. In addition, the deployment on the market of many smart objects connected with these agents has introduced the possibility of controlling and personalising the behaviour of several connected objects using natural language. This has the potential to allow people, also those without a technical background, to effectively control and use the wide variety of connected objects and services. In this paper, we present an analysis of how conversational agents have been used to interact with smart environments (such as smart homes). For this purpose, we have carried out a systematic literature review considering publications selected from the ACM and IEEE digital libraries to investigate the technologies used to design and develop conversational agents for IoT settings, including Artificial Intelligence techniques, the purpose that they have been used for, and the level of user involvement in such studies. The resulting analysis is useful to better understand how this field is evolving and indicate the challenges still open in this area that should be addressed in future research work to allow people to completely benefit from this type of solution.