Resbot: a bi-lingual restaurant booking conversational artificial intelligence

Abstract

AI-powered chatbots in the service industry enhance customer service and enable data-driven decisions. However, in a conversion, the user's input may not always align closely with the training examples, causing even advanced Natural Language Understanding pipelines to occasionally misinterpret the intent behind user utterances, leading to potential conversational missteps. This paper introduces ResBot, an innovative bi-lingual chatbot (Sinhala and English) with a novel hybrid intent classification mechanism. This approach emphasizes the importance of generalization in intent recognition beyond training data using a language model. Furthermore, by automating reservations through its chat interface, the chatbot transforms customer experience and optimizes restaurant operations in an increasingly digital landscape.