Augmenting conversational environment

People are very proficient in collaboratively forming and maintaining gatherings thereby shaping and cultivating collective thoughts through fluent interactions. A big challenge is to develop a technology for augmenting the conversational environment so that people can conduct even better conversational interactions for collective intelligence and creation. Conversational informatics is a field of research that focuses on investigating conversational interactions and designing artifacts that can interact with people in a conversational fashion. The field draws on a foundation provided by artificial intelligence, natural language processing, speech and image processing, cognitive science, and conversation analysis. In this article, I will discuss the opportunity and challenges in an engineering approach to conversational informatics. I will focus on an immersive interaction environment that not only serves as an augmented environment for conversation but also allows us to synthesize conversational artifacts. I also discuss issues for making agents empathic so that they can induce sustained and constructive engagement with people.