Rahhal: A Tourist Arabic Chatbot

A chatbot is an artificial intelligence-based program that is able to interact with humans in a messaging style. It answers queries and provides useful information that could otherwise be offered with costly human labor. Chatbots are important to enhance user and customer experience in multiple domains like education, medicine, entertainment, and commerce. Although the research and commercialization of English chatbots is evolving relatively rapidly, Arabic chatbots are comparably scarce. Moreover, the tourism sector in Saudi Arabia, the second largest in the Middle East, is growing rapidly, especially after 2019. Hence, the contribution of this paper as it presents an Arabic chatbot that aids leisure tourists in Saudi Arabia with two implementations, the first is implemented using Java and the second was developed using IBM Watson. Both chatbots are deployed in Telegram. The testing of the chatbots proved its high usability and utility in aiding tourists.