The state-of-the-art shows the potential of chatbots and other Machine Learning (ML) models to perform many tasks of high quality. Especially chatbots are already used by many companies to assist their customer service. However, chatbots will likely never be able to perform all tasks perfectly. Therefore, it is still the question whether such a chatbot is valuable for a business. Current research fails to describe how chatbots should be evaluated to compute the value of a chatbot for a business. In this research, we design an evaluation framework capturing the value of a chatbot in customer service. This framework consists of several key dimensions which should be computed in order to determine the value of the chatbot. To show that this evaluation framework captures the value of a chatbot, we perform a case study on water utility companies in The Netherlands. This case study showed the designed evaluation framework does capture the value of a chatbot in customer service.

Recent times once more informed us on the relevance of capable online collaborative tools. For our online collaborative XML editor, we have looked into technologies for constrained block editing which, obeying schemas such as with XML, permit on- and offline users or agents to add, delete, copy, move, split and merge blocks of text. To that end, we studied the current state of Operational Transformations (OT) and Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDT). Furthermore, after selection of the best-ranking enabling technology, we studied existing CRDT implementations for unstructured texts, and extended a Logoot-based CRDT to implement on-and offline split and merge block support. We designed a proof of concept and created a scientific prototype to deliver a proof of concept stability, reproducibility and convergence. For now, we excluded undo and redo operations. Given these conditions, we deliver emperical evidence of our implementation to converge under all circumstances, including split and acyclic block mergers. Finally, we give an outlook and design recommendations for production implementations, and suggestions for tackling the problem of cyclic references in block mergers.