Conceptualising a Library Chatbot using Open Source Conversational Artificial Intelligence

Conversational software, or chatbots in popular parlance, have been considered a potential game changer for people-centric institutions for some time now. In sync with the trend, various libraries and knowledge resource centres have also adopted chatbots within their technological fold, with an aim to provide improved services to patrons. The only bottleneck towards such implementation has been the dearth of open source conversational software platforms. The purpose of the paper is to conceptualise a novel library chatbot using a recently developed, artificial intelligence-powered open source conversational software platform named Rasa, and to propose its potential adoption by libraries. The paper introduces the essence of chatbot technology and their present-day application in libraries. The paper also illustrates the technical underpinnings of Rasa Stack that can be leveraged to develop a library chatbot, and reflects on the potential future research in this direction.