Are we ready to bat for the bot?

Are we ready to bat for the bot?

Alexa and Siri have been undertaking more tasks from their owners than before. We also see chatbots enabling online visitors with a coming explanation of basic services and managing customer care for many companies. One of the recent examples is Haptik, up with a chatbot with FAQs on COVID-19 – the pandemic we are battling together.

Bots and eLearning

The eLearning industry has benefitted a lot from advances in NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Speech Recognition. So, over a period of time, we have seen chatbots and voice bots with improved functionalities.

The benefits of chatbots and voice bots

Personalized learning

While taking a course, a learner can quickly type or ask a question and get clarifications. Similarly, learners can get assistance in form-filling and choosing drop-down options. As all learners come from different backgrounds and have a different learning curve, having a chatbot or voice bot as an assistant is a reassuring feature.

Course Navigation

For long and complex courses, chatbots and voice bots can help in course navigation whenever a learner is stuck.

Gaming Assistance

eLearning regularly uses gaming as a solution, especially for highly technical content that needs a light format. In gaming as well, bots can keep the journey light-hearted and fun. Imagine a bot cheering you for completing a milestone or cautioning you for a hurdle ahead.

Upping the ante for interactivity

Going beyond mere clicks, chatbots, and voice bots can unlock the potential of true interactivity. They can build a bond with learners and advanced bots can even enable proactive communication to make learning more fruitful.

Helping Shy Learners

Bots can help shy learners get more active with their messaging. We see many mental health startups using chatbots for people and professionals dealing with anxiety and disorders.

Challenges

Taking bots to the next level requires a lot of investments in NLP and speech recognition. Again, in a global world, voice bots need to be familiar with different accents for meaningful conversations. Chatbots have to deal with issues arising out of text errors, incomplete messages. While voice bots have an advantage because our voice conversations are more complete and meaningful. Companies need to invest a lot of time and resources to come up with useful training data for bots to make a difference.

 – By Saurabh Turakhia, Senior Content Writer at MPS Interactive Systems