Defining Requirements for the Development of Useful and Usable Chatbots: An Analysis of Quality Attributes from Academy and Industry

Abstract

Chatbots are conversational interfaces that enable human-like dialogue and can be designed in a textual chat format or a graphical interface with voice and embedding options. In the last year, there has been a significant growth in the emergence of chatbots in the market and this popularization has attracted the efforts of researchers to this area. Despite the existence of techniques to evaluate these tools, there is an urgent need to propose solutions that also support the chatbot design process. Currently, there is no knowledge of a specific list of requirements capable of supporting development teams in the process of designing these tools. In view of this, this directed study proposes a literature review aiming at deepening the knowledge about these tools and identifying important quality attributes in academic and industry sources. As a result, this directed study presents a list composed of 82 requirements related to Usefulness, Ease of Use and Presence to aid the design of these tools. These requirements presented in this study are useful to guide developers in the process of building quality chatbots, making this task less challenging and for researchers who aim to propose technologies that contribute to the development of better and better chatbots.