Review of Platforms and Frameworks for Building Virtual Assistants

Virtual assistants offer a new type of solution to handle interaction between human and machine and can be applied in various business contexts such as Industry or Education. When designing and building a virtual assistant the developers must ensure a set of parameters to achieve a good solution. Various platforms and frameworks emerged to allow developers to create virtual assistant solutions easier and faster. This paper provides a review of available platforms and frameworks used by authors to create their own solutions in different areas. Big tech companies like Google with Dialogflow, IBM with Watson Assistant and Microsoft with Bot Framework, present mature solutions to build virtual assistants that provide to the developer all components of the basic architecture to build a fast and solid solution. Open-Source solutions focus on providing to the developer the main components to build a virtual assistant, namely language understanding and response generation.