broad range of applications in business enterprises, education, government, healthcare, and entertainment. For example: Responding to customers' questions about products and services via a company's website or intranet portal Customer service agent knowledge base: Allows agents to type in a customer's question and guide them with a response Guided selling: Facilitating transactions by providing answers and guidance in the sales process, particularly for complex products being sold to novice customers Help desk: Responding to internal employee questions, e.g., responding to HR questions Website navigation: Guiding customers to relevant portions of complex websites—a Website concierge Technical support: Responding to technical problems, such as diagnosing a problem with a product or device Personalized service: Conversational agents can leverage internal and external databases to personalise interactions, such as answering questions about account balances, providing portfolio information, delivering frequent flier or membership information, for example Training or education: They can provide problem-solving advice while the user learns Simple dialogue systems are widely used to decrease the human workload in call centers. In this and other industrial telephony applications, the functionality provided by dialogue systems is known as interactive voice response or IVR. Support scientist in data manipulation and analysis tasks, for example in genomics. In some cases, conversational agents can interact with users using artificial characters. These agents are then referred to as embodied agents. Toolkits and architectures A survey of current frameworks, languages and technologies for defining dialogue systems. See also Call avoidance References Further reading Multimodal interaction User interfaces Systems engineering