Conversational AI involves the development of AI systems capable of natural language conversations. It uses technologies like natural language processing, speech recognition, and speech synthesis to generate human-like responses. Computational linguistics is the study of linguistics and computer science to develop computational models and algorithms for processing and understanding human language. It includes speech recognition, machine translation, and sentiment analysis to enable computers to understand and analyze language. Conversational AI is used in various applications, including virtual assistants and chatbots. The linguistic structure of speech is essential in conversational AI, comprising of phones, phonemes, syllables, words, and utterances. A conversational AI pipeline involves two components: Speech AI and Natural Language Processing. Speech AI includes Automatic Speech Recognition and Text to Speech conversion, while NLP includes Natural Language Understanding and Natural Language Generation.

source update: A Guide to Computational Linguistics and Conversational AI – Towards AI