Directory of intelligent conversational agents

Put them to work for education

The use of intelligent conversational agents (Chatbots assisted by artificial intelligence) is becoming commonplace, and their market is developing at high speed. Who hasn't interacted with Siri, Alexa or Google? Facebook has dozens of conversational agents, as do most major commercial companies.

In education, there's been interest since at least 2005, with Duolingo leading the way in 2018 and CNED's Jules now in its second version. Some tutoring services are starting to implement it.

Freedom from repetition

Knowing that around 80% of students' questions have already been answered before, the idea of implementing a conversational agent makes it possible to focus efforts on the remaining 20%, reduce costs and make the tutor's, trainer's or teacher's work more interesting, less repetitive.

Some of these agents are even beginning to take into account a person's emotional tone and language level. In this way, they can direct people more or less quickly to the right resources or to a human ear, depending on the urgency or difficulty of the case.

A human tutor rarely responds in the same way, even if the question is identical. From the thousands of accumulated answers, the A.I. can choose the one that seems most appropriate.

Implementation

These conversational agents run on data. If you've kept all the e-mails received and sent by students since the early days of the Internet at your institution, or the recordings of interventions, the relevance of the agent's responses will be high from the outset. Otherwise, the database will have to be enriched gradually, and the quality of responses will increase over time. Initially, there will be an effort to adapt, and performance will not necessarily be up to scratch.

Some can handle voice, but most stick to text, whether by e-mail or instant messaging. Natural language processing has become the standard, so even if there are spelling or syntax errors, the conversation can still continue.

A solution for hybrid teaching

Most of these conversational systems are aimed at commercial enterprises, but the difference between a consumer wanting to know how to operate his product and a student wanting to know how to solve his problem lies only in the database. The process is the same: a question calls for an answer, and there may be several ways of getting there.

So there's nothing wrong with using these systems to support your teaching, especially in hybrid and distance learning. Unicef, for example, uses one to produce the U-Report. Open the chat window and ask him if he speaks French, and off you go!