A contemporary review on chatbots, AI-powered virtual conversational agents, ChatGPT: Applications, open challenges and future research directions

Abstract

This review paper offers an in-depth analysis of AI-powered virtual conversational agents, specifically focusing on OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The main contributions of this paper are threefold: (i) an exhaustive review of prior literature on chatbots, (ii) a background of chatbots including existing chatbots/conversational agents like ChatGPT, and (iii) a UI/UX design analysis of prominent chatbots. Another contribution of this review is the comprehensive exploration of ChatGPT’s applications across a multitude of sectors, including education, business, public health, and more. This review highlights the transformative potential of ChatGPT, despite the challenges it faces such as hallucination, biases in training data, jailbreaks, and anonymous data collection. The review paper then presents a comprehensive survey of prior literature reviews on chatbots, identifying gaps in the prior work and highlighting the need for further research in areas such as chatbot evaluation, user experience, and ethical considerations. The paper also provides a detailed analysis of the UI/UX design of prominent chatbots, including their conversational flow, visual design, and user engagement. The paper also identifies key future research directions, including mitigating language bias, enhancing ethical decision-making capabilities, improving user interaction and personalization, and developing robust governance frameworks. By solving these issues, we can ensure that AI chatbots like ChatGPT are used responsibly and effectively across a broad variety of applications. This review will be a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in understanding the current state and future potential of AI chatbots like ChatGPT.