Conceptualising a Library Chatbot using Open Source Conversational Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Conversational software, or chatbots in popular parlance, has been in vogue amongst organizations for a few decades now. In sync with the trend, various libraries and knowledge resource centres have also adopted them within their technological fold, with an aim to provide improved services to patrons. The only bottleneck towards such implementation has been the dearth of open source conversational software platforms. The purpose of the paper is to conceptualize a library chatbot using a recently developed, artificial intelligence-powered open source conversational software platform named Rasa Stack. It introduces the essence of chatbot technology and their present day application in libraries, illustrates how the technical underpinnings of Rasa Stack can be leveraged to develop a library chatbot, and reflects on the potential future research in this direction.