  We survey SoTA open-domain conversational AI models with the purpose of
presenting the prevailing challenges that still exist to spur future research.
In addition, we provide statistics on the gender of conversational AI in order
to guide the ethics discussion surrounding the issue. Open-domain
conversational AI are known to have several challenges, including bland
responses and performance degradation when prompted with figurative language,
among others. First, we provide some background by discussing some topics of
interest in conversational AI. We then discuss the method applied to the two
investigations carried out that make up this study. The first investigation
involves a search for recent SoTA open-domain conversational AI models while
the second involves the search for 100 conversational AI to assess their
gender. Results of the survey show that progress has been made with recent SoTA
conversational AI, but there are still persistent challenges that need to be
solved, and the female gender is more common than the male for conversational
AI. One main take-away is that hybrid models of conversational AI offer more
advantages than any single architecture. The key contributions of this survey
are 1) the identification of prevailing challenges in SoTA open-domain
conversational AI, 2) the unusual discussion about open-domain conversational
AI for low-resource languages, and 3) the discussion about the ethics
surrounding the gender of conversational AI.
