ProBot: An Online Aid to Procurement

The activity of procurement is one such activity that is not only crucial for any organization from the fiscal point of view but also involves a great deal of lucubration both on human and software fronts. In this paper, we discuss about a chatbot developed to automate this tedious process. FinderBuddy is a procurement bot i.e. it is a chatbot designed to facilitate the procurement process in industries. (Here, FinderBuddy was designed for a simple office building where the bulk of work is on desk work. Hence the supplies in the database are predominantly stationery items and office supplies).It enables all the important features like issuing of desired items from the inventory, procuring best deals of materials from suppliers, etc. Apart from these, it also offers advanced features like processing natural language input (apart from accepting queries in a well-defined syntax), accepting voice input, delivering audio output, displaying items running short in the inventory, updating quantities of items in the inventory, tracking pre placed orders, changing orders still in processing, cancelling orders, reordering past orders, checking availability of various items in the inventory, review of past orders, spell check etc. Thus the chat bot provides all possible features to make the procurement process lucid, smooth and user friendly with least human intervention. The design involves crucial use of database concepts, Natural Language Processing, Web Scraping and Speech-to-Text (and vice versa) conversion. The implementation is carried out in Python and SQL using varied APIs.