Chatbots for Enterprises: Outlook

Abstract

Chatbots are going to be the main tool for automated conversations with customers. Still, there is no consistent methodology for choosing a suitable chatbot platform for a particular business. This paper proposes a new method for chatbot platform evaluation. To describe the current state of chatbot platforms, two high-level approaches to chatbot platform design are discussed and compared. WYSIWYG platforms aim to simplicity but may lack some advanced features. All-purpose chatbot platforms require extensive technical skills and are more expensive but give their users more freedom in chatbot design. We provide an evaluation of six major chatbot solutions. The proposed method for the chatbot selection is demonstrated on two sample businesses – a large bank and a small taxi service.

Graph-Based Conversational AI: Towards a Distributed and Collaborative Multi-Chatbot Approach for Museums

“…The AHP method is widely used in the field of information systems as its main advantage is that the users of the AHP method can determine their own evaluation criteria (attributes) for the evaluated systems. The AHP method comprises in short of six main steps [91][92][93][94]:…”

“…When a user set a question the "Mega" Agent is designed to recognize the intent, search all the connected chatbots and provide the right answer [126]. Dialogflow has two editions: a) the standard edition which provides unlimited text messages for chatbot applications and Google assistant, with limitations in speech recognition and the amount of knowledge connectors, b) the Pro edition that offers text and audio messages with a cost per request [92,100,117,118,127,128].…”

“…IBM offers free (limited), standard, and premium plans for the Watson Assistant. Watson Assistant is designed to work perfectly with the internal components that IBM is offering, such as IBM cloud [92,117,118,123,127,130,131].…”

“…Microsoft Bot Framework provides a standard free version with unlimited messages on standard channels (Cortana, Skype, and Microsoft Teams) and limitation on premium channels, which can be unlocked with a subscription per number of messages. The Microsoft Bot Framework is considered a complex all-purpose platform that requires much effort in combining many different sub-apps [92,103,117,123,127].…”

“…As it was stated in previous sections, this evaluation is conducted with the Analytic Hierarchical Process (AHP) evaluation method. Our evaluation approach is based on the methodology of Kostelnik [92] and Braun et al [118] but is focusing on the museum domain and introduces different evaluation attributes.…”