Conversational agents for virtual research environments: a survey of the literature

Conversational artificial intelligence is becoming a rather hot topic in the field of artificial intelligence especially after the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI. That is why it is useful to conduct a survey of the literature regarding conversational agents in order to have an idea about the techniques used to develop such systems. Therefore, the aim of this report is to aggregate and summarize the previous research efforts in order to provide insight that would aid future researchers. In addition, the survey was conducted within the context of developing Janet, a conversational agent for virtual research environments; thus, it can be used as a starting point for similar projects.