A Chat bot, or a chatter bot, is a computer program designed to maintain an intelligent conversation with a human. Chat bots have become a huge part of our life without even noticing it. Our daily life presents a number of activities where chat bots were involved.
The purposes of chat bots vary from simple and entertaining ones to more sophisticated. You can use a chat bot as your chat partner (knowingly or unknowingly) because you feel lonely or bored, or you can use the chat bots’ services as a virtual assistant to help out in your business.
In all cases it would be unwise to ignore the ability of chat bots to sustain a human-like real-time conversation and not use it to our benefit. Constant development of technology contributes to the practical aspects of chat bots’ use.
Many companies have already taken advantage of chat bots by implementing them into their business schemes. There are chat bots that work as virtual assistants, consultants, customer service managers, etc. Over 500 companies around the globe have “hired” chat bots to perform simple (sometimes more complex) tasks. This helps to reduce costs and operational time.
Another field where chat bots were effectively used is education. Today’s teaching and training are different from those 10 years ago. Again we can thank rapid technology development for this. The use of computers in educational process changed the traditional approach to teaching. Of course, we can’t say that the number of computers per person in every country is the same. In some countries people have not seen a computer other than on TV while in others there might be 3 to 4 personal computers per household.
However, we can’t deny that “computerized” nations have a choice between traditional education methods and new-age ones. New methods include Intelligent Tutoring Systems which was based on the adaptation to the needs of a particular learner.
These systems use the so called pedagogical agents which are presented as a certain person, have a name, an avatar, so that you know who the student communicates with. Depending on the course, these programs can be the student’s classmate, competition, a helper, or a guide. To make the process efficient, the agent is suppose to answer the student’s questions, give explanations as needed, and monitor the student’s activity and progress.
One of the effective working solutions is SmartHelp System by Apangea (http://apangea.com/index.htm). It is mostly used to teach math to high school students. The program includes combination of tutoring technology (based on chat bots’ algorithm) and human teachers. SmartHelp provides information, adapts the learning material to the needs of a student, controls his/her progress. In case the program can’t handle an issue that might arise, a real teacher steps in and provides individualized support and assistance to the student.
Another interesting Intelligent Tutoring System is Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ), also known as Tutoring Spoken Dialog System. This system was based on a computer-student interaction for the purpose of providing learning materials. This system was experimentally used for teaching students of Birmingham University the basics of C programming by discussing of several aspects of this computer language. Students acknowledged the simplicity of the system’s used and confirmed that they enjoyed interaction with a chat bot.
As long as technology is evolving virtual tutors will keep conquering the education world. The idea of teaching computers to teach students the way a human teacher would do looks appealing.
Such programs can provide basic science concept; illustrate them with charts, diagrams, pictures; answer students’ questions; ask them questions in order to evaluate their understanding; maintain a dialog; and monitor the progress of each student. The most important thing is that each student will have personal attention of a tutor which often lacks in schools where the number of students in a class is at times too high for a teacher to reach out to each individual student.
We don’t know how far it might and will go. We don’t know if such education has benefits, advantages and is better than a traditional system. It might be better, it might be worse. But we can’t deny that things are changing.
No comments:
Post a Comment