Chatbot Development Through the Ages : A Survey

A chatbot is a computer program that aims to make a conversation between both humans and machines. The chatbot can be utilized in a variety of platforms, including messaging apps and virtual assistants. The chatbot has evolved a lot in decades starting from amusement usage to performing serious tasks. While designing a chatbot, design considerations like purpose, audience, channels, conversational flow, testing and iterations must be taken into account in order to ensure that it is accurate and user-friendly. Based on its domain, model, and conversation style, a chatbot can be categorized into customer-service, sales, informational, personal assistant, entertainment, health and educational chatbot. Chatbot technology continues to face a wide variety of challenges like contextual understanding, integration with backend systems, personalization, security and user acceptance. This paper explores and compares various recent chatbots from different domains that are being used. We have surveyed the entire development process and the different development techniques used to design chatbots and the audience they cater to. We also look at the various evaluation methodologies used in checking the efficiency and enforceability of the considered chatbots.