Chatbots: An Overview of Current Issues and Challenges

Chatbots or conversational agents have recently received a new boost, not least due to advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Media reports on individual implementations such as ChatGPT testify to the relevance of the topic and impressively demonstrate their capabilities. However, although these new systems appear to know no boundaries, the question of challenges and problems associated with novel chatbots remains. Are old problems such as language comprehension and context awareness a thing of the past? What new challenges are conceivable? By means of a structured literature review (SLR) in seven scientific databases, 124 highly relevant and recent works from January 2019 to May 2023 are selected and summarized into a concept matrix of current problems and challenges. This shows that old issues such as language comprehension, training and maintenance are prevalent, but also highlights new challenges such as interpretability, fears or biases. This paper thus contributes to the critical reflection of chatbots as well as their use and provides incentives for further research and development.