Description

A chatbot is an interface, either explicitly programmed or based on machine learning, enabling a (somewhat) natural conversation through voice or text.

Media

A textual chatbot can be available through messaging apps, such as Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, or WeChat, as well as directly on an app or a website, often in the shape of an integrated pop-up.

The most common voice chatbots are virtual assistants, for instance Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, or Apple's Siri.

Working principles

Text chatbots can use simple keywords to interpret users' requests, or they can rely on natural language understanding (NLU), a specialized artificial intelligence topic on machine reading comprehension.

Voice chatbots are usully based on text ones: speech-to-text and text-to-speech engines are used for the conversion.

NLU, speech recognition and natural language generation together make the natural language processing (NLP) field.

Use in the airline industry

Any customer-facing service may be provided through a chatbot. For instance, the NDC functionalities of shopping flights and ancillaries, and booking management, can be made available to the end user through chatbots. Such interfaces are already offered by some airlines and start-ups.