A Novel Methodology for Developing Troubleshooting Chatbots Applied to ATM Technical Maintenance Support

The banking industry has been employing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to enhance the quality of its services. More recently, AI algorithms, such as natural language understanding (NLU), have been integrated into chatbots to improve banking applications. These chatbots are typically designed to cater to customers’ needs. However, research in the development of troubleshooting chatbots for technical purposes remains scarce, especially in the banking sector. Although a company may possess a knowledge database, a standard methodology is essential to guiding an AI developer in building a chatbot, making the modeling of technical needs into a specialized chatbot a challenging task. This paper presents a novel methodology for developing troubleshooting chatbots. We apply this methodology to create an AI-powered chatbot capable of performing technical ATM maintenance tasks. We propose the TroubleshootingBot, an experimental protocol to obtain data for evaluating the chatbot through two scenarios. The first scenario detects user intent, and the second recognizes desired values in a user’s phrase (e.g., three beeps or two beeps). For these scenarios, we achieved accuracies of 0.93 and 0.88, respectively. This work represents a significant advancement in virtual assistants for banking applications and holds potential for other technical problem-solving applications.