Survey on Chatbot Design Techniques in Speech Conversation Systems

Human-Computer Speech is gaining momentum as a technique of computer interaction. There has been a recent upsurge in speech based search engines and assistants such as Siri, Google Chrome and Cortana. Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques such as NLTK for Python can be applied to analyse speech, and intelligent responses can be found by designing an engine to provide appropriate human like responses. This type of programme is called a Chatbot, which is the focus of this study. This paper presents a survey on the techniques used to design Chatbots and a comparison is made between different design techniques from nine carefully selected papers according to the main methods adopted. These papers are representative of the significant improvements in Chatbots in the last decade. The paper discusses the similarities and differences in the techniques and examines in particular the Loebner prize-winning Chatbots.