James Lester, L. Karl Branting, and Brad Mott, Conversational Agents, Practical Handbook to Internet Computing, Munindar Singh (Ed.), CRC Press, 2004. Abstract: Conversational agents integrate computational linguistics techniques with the communication channel of the Web to interpret and respond to statements made by users in ordinary natural language. Web-based conversational agents deliver high-volumes of interactive text-based dialogs. Recent years have seen significant activity in enterprise-class conversational agents. This chapter describes the principal applications of conversational agents in the enterprise and the technical challenges posed by their design and large-scale deployments. These technical challenges fall into two categories: accurate and efficient natural-language processing; and the scalability, performance, reliability, integration, and maintenance requirements posed by enterprise deployments.