The role of chatterbots in enhancing tourism: a case study of Penang tourism spots

Abstract

Chatterbots have been widely used as a tool for conversational booking assistance mainly for hotels such as the Expedia. This paper extends the use of chatterbot beyond booking by presenting the proof of concept of a chatterbot expert system called the VIZARD. The proposed VIZARD is developed using an expert system shell called verbot. The core of Vertbot 5 is the natural language processing (NLP) engine based on pattern matching. The core Verbot 5 engine is responsible for finding matches to a given user input string and firing the appropriate rule. The findings from the user acceptance test concluded that majority of the respondents agreed that the VIZARD expert system stands at an unbiased state while being more aligned on supporting the usefulness of the system.