An introduction to the special issue on conversational search and recommendation is presented in this article. While conversational search and recommendation has roots in early Information Retrieval (IR) research, the recent advances in automatic voice recognition and conversational agents have created increasing interest in this area. In recent years, the IR and related communities have witnessed a number of major contributions to the field of conversational search and recommendation. They include but are not limited to conversational search conceptualization. The growing body of work in this area has been supplemented by an increasing number of recent seminars.