Natural conversation is a hallmark of intelligent systems. Unsurprisingly, dialog systems have been a key sub-area of AI for decades. Their most recent form, chatbots, which can engage people in natural conversation and are easy to build in software, have been in the news a lot lately. There are many platforms to create dialogs quickly for any domain based on simple rules. Further, there is a mad rush by companies to release chatbots to show their AI capabilities and gain market valuation. However, beyond basic demonstration, there is little experience in how they can be designed and used for real-world applications needing decision making under constraints (for example, sequential decision making). The workshop will thus be timely to help chatbots realize their full potential.Furthermore, there is upcoming interest and need for innovation in human-technology-interaction as addressed in the context of companion technology. Here, the aim is to implement technical systems that smartly adapt their functionality to their users’ individual needs and requirements and are even able to solve problems in close co-operation with human users. To this end, they need to enter into a dialog and should be able to convincingly explain their suggestions and their decision making behavior.From research side, statistical and machine learning methods are well entrenched for language understanding and entity detection. However, the wider problem of dialog management is unaddressed with mainstream tools supporting rudimentary rule-based processing. There is an urgent need to highlight the crucial role of reasoning methods, like constraints satisfaction, planning and scheduling, and learning working together with them, can play to build an end-to-end conversation system that evolves over time. From practical side, conversation systems need to be designed for working with people in a manner that they can explain their reasoning, convince humans about choices among alternatives, and can stand up to ethical standards demanded in real life settings.