Analysis of Tools for the Development of Conversational Agents

Conversational agents are being increasingly adopted in various domains, such as e-commerce and customer services, and as a direct communication channel between companies and end-users. Several tools have been developed to facilitate their definition and deployment. They exploit existing cloud infrastructures and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to efficiently process users’ input and extract conversational information. Major Information Technology (IT) companies, such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon, have provided powerful tools to develop conversational agents. Still, choosing the most appropriate tool is not easy, as it may require high costs associated with automatic natural language processing (NLP) services and expertise in software engineering and AI. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze different tools to help developers and non-developers to choose the optimal tool for their specific scenario of creating a conversational agent.