Communication is the universal solvent: atreya bot -- an interactive bot for chemical scientists

Abstract

Conversational agents are a recent trend in human-computer interaction, deployed in multidisciplinary applications to assist the users. In this paper, we introduce "Atreya", an interactive bot for chemistry enthusiasts, researchers, and students to study the ChEMBL database. Atreya is hosted by Telegram, a popular cloud-based instant messaging application. This user-friendly bot queries the ChEMBL database, retrieves the drug details for a particular disease, targets associated with that drug, etc. This paper explores the potential of using a conversational agent to assist chemistry students and chemical scientist in complex information seeking process.