CHARM: a Group Decision Making Support Chatbot

Messaging apps, such as Telegram and WhatsApp, are routinely used to communicate, chat and make decisions. Group Recommender Systems (GRSs) have been introduced as self standing tools to support group interactions and decision-making. We present here a TelegramBot, named CHARM, that supports groups to make a decision on an arbitrary topic by leveraging GRSs techniques. CHARM helps elicit the group members' preferences, ranks the items that the members have suggested to be considered, provides a summary of the current status of the discussion, and finally recommends a fair choice. A focus group study has revealed that the designed functionality includes features that users expect to find in a bot aimed at supporting group decision-making.