Paper #6

A Customizable Multilingual Chatbot System for Customer Support

Vinothini Kasinathan, Aida Mustapha and Chow Khai Bin

Abstract: Implementing third-party services to develop a chatbot is not cost-effective for many small and medium enterprises especially considering that many services only supports one language at a time. To address this gap, this paper proposes a multilingual chatbot system that will allow companies and organizations to customize and deploy their own multilingual chatbot service with two extended features, which are live chat and ticketing system. The chatbot will also be able to understand and reply in English, Malay, and Chinese as well as customizable given the dialogue shell and knowledge base. To achieve this, the development uses TypeScript for frontend web application while Go as the backend development. The development language for mobile application is Dart and the User Interface (UI) library is React. Finally, the database management system used is MongoDB. The developed prototype is then evaluated via a survey questionnaire and the findings suggested that the proposed system would be able to assist small and medium-sized business and organizations to deploy their own chatbot system as an alternative to existing customer services.

Keywords: Conversational agents; Chatbots; Multilingual; Customer services.