The present dissertation was written as a part of the MSc in Mobile and Web Computing at
the International Hellenic University by the student Gorgias Aristotelis under the supervision
of Dr. Ioannis Magnisalis in cooperation with Dr.Stergios Tegos.
The terrifying rapid growth of technology has led humanity towards new
implementations, expertise and best practices in all aspects of production and creation. This
growth comes from the humans’ continuous effort to evolve, to create and to improve the
way of living and working by researching and experimenting. A critical outcome coming
from all this effort, is the continuous creation of data. Humongous amounts of data are being
generated everyday which has also led to the naming of our current epoch to, “The era of
Big Data”. The constant need of automating things and trying to make life easier in general,
has played a big role in the growth of artificial intelligence in combination with automations.
Speaking of automations, one can easily refer to robots, either hardware or software, that
have a specific set of functionalities to provide assistance when needed. These robots are
mainly created to make things and life easier. As already mentioned, these can either be
consisted by both hardware and software, where software gives meaning to the hardware,
like those you see in movies, or only by software itself.
A software bot is actually a clever algorithm which gets fed by data and gives as an
output some best results. The outcome of the bot can be based on multiple factors. Some of
these factors may be, the user’s needs, the amount of data that will be fed to the bot, technical
criteria, location criteria and more, but the most import factor is the purpose of the bot and
the reason that it has been created (e.g. a medical bot will provide different output to doctors
in contrast to humans with no medical knowledge).
The present dissertation will be consisted of two main chapters. The first will be a brief
review on the current status of the existing chatbots, a report on technologies and tools that
are being used to implement them and finally the scenarios and methods with which these
can be implemented. The second chapter is going to be the implementation of a Chatbot
prototype which will provide the best results to users who want to find the lowest price gas
stations near them.
The implementation will be divided in four parts which are, first, the implementation of
a web scraper which is a process to gather information from the Ministry’s of Development
and Competitiveness website for gas prices for all the gas stations in Greece, second, the
design and creation of a Database to store the data extracted from the scraper, third, the
implementation of a RESTful API which will be available at any time to serve and respond
to requests, and finally the design and implementation of the Chatbot prototype
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