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Chatbot Application on Cryptocurrency Qitao Xie1, Qingquan Zhang2, Dayuan Tan1, Ting Zhu1, Shen Xiao3, Beibei Li4, Lei Sun5, Ping Yi6, Junyu Wang3 1Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, UMBC, USA, fqxie1, dayuan1, [email protected] 2University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, [email protected] 3Hunan University, [email protected] 4Carnegie Mellon University, [email protected] 5Shanghai Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, [email protected] 6Shanghai Jiaotong University, [email protected] Abstract—Many chatbots have been developed that provide human speech so that users would think that they are inter- a multitude of services through a wide range of methods. acting with other people instead of computers. Technological A chatbot is a brand-new conversational agent in the high- advancement in recent decades, like faster computers, faster speed changing technology world. With the advance of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, chatbots are becoming more internet service, and the invention of smartphones, makes the and more popular. A chatbot is the extension of human interface information communication and sharing feasible in reasonable mediums such as the phone and social platforms. Similarly, manners. People created machines and software to simulate Cryptocurrency is a new extension of digital or virtual currency a human-like conversation, which was called ChatterBot by designed to work as a medium of exchange. In the current digital Michael Mauldin in 1994 [2], shortened to chatbot later. Since exchanging world, investors and interested parties are eager to know more information about, and the capabilites of, this new then, the term chatbot has been used to refer to conversational type of currency. One of the potential paths to retrieve the info agents that primarily use text-based or speech-based input. The automatically and quickly is through a chatbot. We explored idea of combining artificial intelligence and the interaction of the open source python library, Chatterbot, to apply Itchat API natural form sped up the development of new chatbot plat- (a WeChat interface) with the aim of building a robot chatting forms. Chatbots are immensely popular at the moment. Tech application, I&C Chat, on the topic of cryptocurrency. First, we collected question and answer pairs datasets from Quora giants’ core products such as IBM Watson, Amazon Alexa, websites. Furthermore, we also created API calls to query the Apple Siri are some examples of popular chatbots. Facebook real time quote for the top 25 cryptocurrencies. Then we used created an online assistant named M and already has bots for the collected data to train our chatbot and implemented a logic small things, like booking a haircut or sending flowers, on its adapter to receive the price quote of cryptocurrencies based on Messenger app. IBM created Watson, a question answering the incoming question. The Itchat API method will return the best matched answer to the asking party automatically. The response computer system, which proved its power by winning the time of different questions has been investigated. The results popular quiz show Jeopardy. Google is also working on a imply that this application is quite useful, feasible and beneficial chat-bot based app to answer user questions. to the digital currency world. Another thing making chatbots popular is the ease with Index Terms—Chatbot, Cryptocurrency which anyone can create one themselves, without any pro- gramming skills needed. As of now, some of the popular I. INTRODUCTION chatbot platforms are: Microsoft Bot platform, Pandorabots, The interaction in the format of speech or text between Facebook Bots for Messenger. Today chatbots are used in humans and computers is gaining more and more in popularity education, business, and in information retrieval processes. nowadays. People expect to have similar experiences when Today, commercial applications of chatbots include: travel they talk to machines as when they talk to human beings. agents, customer service support [3], technical support, per- In order to provide suitable responses based on phrases or sonal assistants, education, marketing, entertainment, legal keywords taken from questions, a dialogue system or program and financial fields, and so on. The communication between is needed, which is often called a chatbot or a chatterbot. the companies and their clients has reached a new level The chatbot is a computer program that has an ability to of intensity. With the rapid development of technology, the communicate with people by providing answers to questions. customer experience is changing dramatically. Therefore, the People input the natural language speech or text, while the use of chatbots in business can be a crucial issue of improv- program provides the most feasible intelligent response in the ing customer communication and customer support. Finally, form of text or speech. information retrieval processes [4] in the legal and financial The history of chatbots started in the 1950s when computer fields are gaining more and more attention. scientist Alan Turing experimented with the concept of com- There is no doubt that digital service and marketing are municating like humans do. In the 1960s Joseph Weizenbaum developing rapidly, with different platforms reaching the audi- published the ELIZA program [1]. At that time researchers ence through things such as website, e-mail, instant messaging, aimed to examine whether these systems can imitate the and social networks. However, a new exciting communication channel, chatbot, is playing the starring role. People already of multi-platform deploying, group chat usage, knowledge- use it daily – Siri and Cortana, which are intelligent personal acquisition beforehand, and access to external resources. assistants in the form of chatbots used in Apple and Windows The paper is organized as follows: in section II, we will devices. With chatbot, you can easily deliver any information introduce why we want to design and implement a chatbot to the potential end-user by creating some pre-defined conver- system on the cryptocurrency topic, then in section III the sations. details of each part of our design will be explained, section Cryptocurrency is new to many people but it has been get- IV illustrates our evaluation and results, and we will conclude ting very hot recently. A cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual in section V. currency designed to work as a medium of exchange [5]. II. MOTIVATION AND BACKGROUND STUDY Different from the conventional currencies, a cryptocurrency uses cryptography to secure and verify transactions as well as People pay attention to cryptocurrency for a multitude of control the creation of new units of a particular cryptocurrency. reasons. One of the most important motives is that in the It was introduced in 2009 but did not grab mainstream media past three years the market capitalization and volume have and people’s eyes until 2012. It may have the potential to had a massive increase. As of May 6, 2018, the total market compete against traditional payment methods like cash or capitalization of cryptocurrencies is bigger than 450 billion check, and other online payment method like credit and debit USD and the record high daily volume is larger than 25 billion cards and PayPal [6]. USD [7], which is almost 1400% bigger than it was in March The construction of a new chatbot steeped in the topic of 2017. Huge capitalization comes along with a huge profile cryptocurrency may prove more than just a novel project. On margin. More and more people are attracted to this field in the one hand, people eagerly want to obtain information on the the hope of cashing in on the trend. topic of cryptocurrency and a quick price quote. On the other On the way of getting on board there are so many new hand, chatbot is a very good conversational agent to meet this terms and concepts in the cryptocurrencies field, as well as requirement, which can provide the information in a human- detailed operations corresponding to this topic, especially for to-human manner. Our goal in this study was to identify a beginners. Meanwhile that information on the internet is so technology for building a chatbot that fulfills the technical scattered that it takes a long time to search and collect all requirements and needs of today’s exciting crypto-market. The of what you want. It would be very convenient if the quick ideal technology should meet the following requirements: be and accurate answers to what we want to know were readily based on an open source platform, to be simple enough and available. One of the best approaches is through a chatbot, a easy enough to implement, and facilitate the support from an human-like conversation application. open source community. The selected technology should be According to the report [8], the chatbot interface has been deployed onto platforms that can be easy to access. very popular and maintains a steady growth. It has been used There are some cryptocurrency information bots in the in Instant Messaging systems, such as Facebook Messenger, market, but most of them are hosted on a specific platform Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and so on. Indeed, Instant such as Facebook messenger. Some of them also limit one- Messaging has more active users than any other social network on-one chatting. For some bots, knowledge information is or mail application [9]. Nearly 4 billion users are accounted for collected on the fly so that it slows down the response.