Abstract
Chatbots, or machine based conversational systems, have become popular in recent years in a variety of applications. Chatbots are intelligent technologies that employ Artificial Intelligence (AI) to converse with humans in their natural languages. Chatbot's primary function is to interpret user's questions and respond with the most convenient intelligent and natural responses. In a number of the world's most generally spoken languages, chatbots appear to be quite successful; however, Arabic chatbots have not yet attained the predicted degree of success. Many academics have recently sought to bridge the gap in the implementation of Arabic chatbots by overcoming the complicated linguistic Arabic language features. This survey reviews the chatbots, their categories and implementation techniques. It also, presents some challenges that face the developer of Arabic chatbots due to rich complex properties of Arabic language. Then, most of published chatbot researches that deal with Arabic language are highlighted. Finally, a table of comparison among the mentioned Arabic chatbots is presented. The study concludes that, all the present AI based Arabic chatbots are developed in retrieval mode, and that Arabic chatbot literature is scarce in comparison to that in many other languages.
