Design and implementation of an airport chatbot.

In the era of universal digitalization and always-connected consumers, companies are expected to offer pervasive, uninterrupted and friendly customer care services. To this end, the recent advances in natural language understanding, enable the creation of artificial attendants, called "chatbots", that were once confined within the domain of science-fiction. This work discusses the design and implementation of a customer support chatbot for the Venice Airport. The main goal of the research was to design a common core able to interact 24/7 by means different paradigms, ranging from speech to touch screens, and through different user interfaces, including mobile phones, fixed installations and physical robots roaming the terminal. This goal has been reached by exploiting modern cloud-based services and by designing a specially-crafted modular system able to interface itself with both online information providers and legacy data sources supplied by the airport ICT infrastructure. This work describes the engineering process, from the prerequisites analysis to a functional description of the devised architecture, and the implementation details of the system presenting a working prototype of the airport chatbot.