Dialogue may seem natural to you, but it involves a series of distinct, complex tasks in order for two or more people to interact smoothly. To recreate that for a conversational AI, such as the one to be featured in the ARI-SPRING robot, you need to emulate a dialogue system. A symplified workflow includes at least an Automated Speech Recognizer (to recognize words), followed by a Natural Language Understanding component (to decode the words and attach semantic meaning to them), a dialogue manager (to infer the intent of the speaker and prepare a response), a Natural Language Generator (selecting words with appropriate semantic meaning for the response), and finally a synthesizer (to make the response intelligible). That’s how complex that is! An introduction to these concepts is given in this SPRING Technical Seminar #3, entitled “Conversational AI for Human-Robot Interaction: an introduction”, by Prof. Oliver Lemon from Heriot Watt University on 10 June 2020 (part 1) and by Prof. Christian Dondrup from Heriot Watt University on 16 June 2020 (part 2).