A Reference Architecture for Applications with Conversational Components

Providing a multi-modal user interface adds value to any application. Allowing users to speak or chat with the system is one such area where software practitioners are putting a lot of effort. This involves building components which can understand the nuances of human conversation. Such components, often called "chatbots, can be built either from scratch, or using a commercial platform. The process of architecting such applications may differ significantly from the "conventional" applications that the software practitioners usually build. In this work, we present a Reference Architecture for building such applications. We apply the Reference Architecture to a sample use-case and provide two Concrete Architectures for the same. The two architectures are designed keeping in mind, two commercial platforms, IBM Watson Assistant and Google DialogFlow, assuming that they were used to build the conversational components.