How to manage a task-oriented virtual assistant software project: an experience report

Task-oriented virtual assistants are software systems that provide users with a natural language interface to complete domain-specific tasks. With the recent technological advances in natural language processing and machine learning, an increasing number of task-oriented virtual assistants have been developed. However, due to the well-known complexity and difficulties of the natural language understanding problem, it is challenging to manage a task-oriented virtual assistant software project. Meanwhile, the management and experience related to the development of virtual assistants are hardly studied or shared in the research community or industry, to the best of our knowledge. To bridge this knowledge gap, in this paper, we share our experience and the lessons that we have learned at managing a task-oriented virtual assistant software project at Microsoft. We believe that our practices and the lessons learned can provide a useful reference for other researchers and practitioners who aim to develop a virtual assistant system. Finally, we have developed a requirement management tool, named SpecSpace, which can facilitate the management of virtual assistant projects.