PathBot: An Intelligent Chatbot for Guiding Visitors and Locating Venues

This article reports the development of an intelligent Chatbot called PathBot. PathBot is used to guide visitors to locate venues on the University of Johannesburg's Bunting Road campus. The conversation of PathBot happens through a Mobile Application client. PathBot processes user's text using the DialogFlow API. We have designed a Finite Automaton that represents a sub-map of the campus. Extracted tokens from the DialogFlow API is sent to this Automaton, and an algorithm is used to generate descriptions of paths from where a user is, to where they want to go. An evaluation of the user's opinion about this tool and its userability was conducted and most users agreed that this Automaton-driven tool is helpful in locating venues on the mapped campus.