Healthcare ex Machina: Are conversational agents ready for prime time in oncology?

Chatbots, also known as conversational agents or digital assistants, are artificial intelligence–driven software programs designed to interact with people in a conversational manner. They are often used for user-friendly customer-service triaging. In healthcare, chatbots can create bidirectional information exchange with patients, which could be leveraged for follow-up, screening, treatment adherence or data-collection. They can be deployed over various modalities, such as text-based services (text messaging, mobile applications, chat rooms) on any website or mobile applications, or audio services, such as Siri, Alexa, Cortana or Google Assistant. Potential applications are very promising, particularly in the field of oncology. In this review, we discuss the available publications and applications and the ongoing trials in that setting.