Hospitality of chatbot building platforms

Abstract

The temptation to be able to talk to a machine is not new. Recent advancements in the field of Natural Language Understanding has made it possible to build conversational components that can be plugged inside an application, similar to other components. These components, called chatbots, can be created from scratch or with the help of commercially available platforms. These platforms make it easier to build and deploy chatbots, often without writing a single line of code. However, similar to any other software component, chatbots also have quality concerns. Despite significant contributions in the field, an architectural perspective of building chatbots with desired quality requirements is missing in the literature. In the current work, we highlight the impact of features provided by these platforms (along with their quality) on the application design process and overall quality attributes. We propose a methodological framework to evaluate support provided by a chatbot platform towards achieving quality in the application. The framework, called Hospitality Framework, is based on software architectural body of knowledge, especially architectural tactics. The framework produces a metric, called Hospitality Index, which has utilities for making various design decisions for the overall application. We present the use of our framework on a simple use case to highlight the phases of evaluation. We showcase the process by picking three popular chatbot platforms - Watson Assistant, DialogFlow and Lex, over four quality attributes - Modifiability, Security & Privacy, Interoperability and Reliability. Our results show that different platforms provide different support for these four quality attributes.