Hispabot-Covid19 is a conversational system developed for the Spanish Government to provide responses to frequently asked questions related to the pandemic originated by Covid-19 and its implications in Spain. The system received more than 350,000 queries between April and June 2020, being a clear example of how conversational systems can be applied to reduce the pressure on the health emergency phone lines and to provide 24/7 access to information and services using natural language. In this paper, we describe the main features of the Hispabot-Covid19 system.

As the complexity of intelligent environments grows, there is a need for more sophisticated and flexible interfaces. Conversational systems constitute a very interesting alternative to ease the users’ workload when interacting with such environments, as they can operate them in natural language. A number of commercial toolkits for their implementation have appeared recently. However, these are usually tailored to specific implementations of the processes involved for processing the user’s utterance and generate the system response. In this paper, we present a modular architecture to develop conversational systems by means of a plug-and-play paradigm that allows the integration of developers’ specific implementations and commercial utilities under different configurations that can be adapted to the specific requirements for each system.