Context-awareness, digressions and randomness in modern chatbot design

Bots can quite easily follow a straightforward dialog about a single topic, asking questions and understanding answers sequentially. Now allowing the bot to extract entities that are not directly requested, or going back to a statement said earlier in the dialog in order to change it, are more difficult tasks. Enabling the bot to handle one or several digressions proves to be even harder. This leads to a paradigm shift in conversation design for chatbot developers. We will review the problems brought about by this shift and how to address them.