Investigating user perceptions of conversational agents for software-related exploratory web search
Matthew Frazier, Shaayal Kumar, Kostadin Damevski, Lori Pollock · 2022
Conversational agents that respond to user information requests through a natural conversation have the potential to revolutionize how we acquire new information on the Web (i.e., perform exploratory Web searches). Recent advances to conversational search agents use popular Web search engines as a back-end and sophisticated AI algorithms to maintain context, automatically generate search queries, and summarize results into utterances. While showing impressive results on general topics, the potential of this technology for software engineering is unclear.