Abstract
Chatbot is a conversational question answering (Q&A) system capable of natural language communication between a computer system and a person. The use of chatbots for 24-hour customer service provides quick responses that solve problems online. This approach is quickly becoming a convenient way for companies to enhance their customer services without location or knowledgeable staff limitations. This research proposes a system framework and develops a prototype virtual reality (VR) enabled transformer mass-customization consultation chatbot. The chatbot technique is a retrieval-based intelligent system. First, thousands of transformer specific frequently asked questions (FAQs) are collected as a Q&A dataset for technical supports retrieval. More than 1.2 million engineering Wikipedia pages and engineering technical papers are used to train a word embedding model used for natural language processing and question-answer retrieval. The chatbot is integrated into a virtual reality (VR) immersive user interface (UI) environment enabling users to make transformer design changes while querying the system about specifications and standards while interacting with 3D models from the company's knowledge base archive. The system provides two unique UIs for personal computer (PC) and a helmet-based immersive interface. The system supports real-time consultation of mass-customized transformers and their bills of materials (BOM) for design review, analysis and cost estimation.