An E-commerce chatbot with natural language processing ability

Abstract

As technology progresses, a growing number of businesses and restaurants are moving to the online space. These days, brick and mortar stores are no longer sufficient to run a profitable and memorable business, omnichannel is a must for any company to thrive. This includes restaurants and other dining outlets, a type of business that are traditionally generating revenue via foot traffic and word of mouth. During the recent COVID-19 pandemic, it has become even more important for restaurants to offer delivery and have a good online presence to stay afloat, as people could not and should not dine out to ensure their personal safety.

Amongst various ways of enhancing online presence, chatbots are a perfect match for restaurants and dining outlets. Customers are used to talking to a real person when arriving at restaurants and chatbots could provide similar experiences online. Especially now that artificial intelligence is growing at an astounding rate, chatbots could be implemented with Natural Language Processing (NLP) ability that ensures customers will have the most user-friendly and a very natural, humanized conversation with the bot.

In this project, Kristine the chatbot will be deployed to assist customers in online delivery orders as well as seat reservations among other features. It will be built specifically for a pizza and salad outlet but can easily be updated for other types of restaurants. The bot is capable of processing and understanding the natural English language, which will assist to provide excellent service for the customers.