Development and Evaluation of a Chatbot for the Regional Museum of São João del-Rei

Abstract

The use of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) has promoted changes in the way in which information is distributed. A challenge is to explore the integration of new ICTs, such as smartphones and chatbots, to disseminate information within a regional museum. In this paper, we proposed the development of a chatbot to the Regional Museum of Sao Joao del-Rei to present his most outstanding artifact, a painting named Retrato de Menina. This paper presents the chatbot design in which was implemented on the IBM Watson platform. An evaluation with users was performed applying the Wizard of Oz method. The results of the evaluation evidenced that the proposed chatbot satisfies users, although it is necessary to improve the communication flow in order to guide users in the chatbot's interaction. The results showed that implementing several chatbots (i.e., one for each artifact of the museum) is better than making a single one, because this way avoids failures in determining dialog contexts and explore more playful interaction styles, such as chatbots that pretend to be the character of some artifact.