Desirable Features of a Chatbot-building Platform

There is a visible eagerness in the business community to integrate chatbots with their websites and mobile apps. They provide a humanised interface to information and can serve as digital assistants that can perform tasks on behalf of an individual. There are many commercial platforms which provide interfaces to build these chatbots. They are used by both professional software developers as well as people from non-IT backgrounds. Based on our experiences with three popular chatbot-building platforms - Google Dialogflow, IBM Watson Assistant and Amazon Lex, we present a list of desirable features that these platforms should exhibit in order to cater to their mixed user base. We also rate the availability and ease of use of these features on the current versions of these platforms.