Can bots be more than just your chat buddy?
Do you ever believe your personal all-power bot in your cellphone will be as powerful as Tony Stark’s A.I Jarvis? Perhaps not in the near future, but do you know that right now it can help you study and even educate you?
Bots and artificial intelligence are like technical marvels of our sci fi world. We are both amazed and scared by what they can do to our lives. It could become either David 8, a perfect futuristic A.I helper in your Alien vs. Predator franchise, or Ultron, Marvel’s ultimate destruction of humanity. But we have to admit that both of those extreme imaginations are often too fictional. The reality often lies somewhere in the grey area between those two.
The bots are here right now
No matter what you think about bots, a lot of people are using them already. Facebook already has bots operating services in its messenger app. Slack, the corporate messaging service, also has bots that can manage your expenses and even order the beers for you. Amazon is working with Echo, a voice-controlled product that can handles a variety of tasks — from looking up recipes, ordering groceries to playing songs and reading e-books aloud.
So where will the bot take its place in your life journey onward?
If your bot was to be your assistant, how would you make the most out of it? Apart from all the cool Hollywood futuristic stuffs that you have been seeing all the time, chances are that you only use your bot as your personal steward or secretary. You let it manage all your schedules, appointments, and basic services. But can bots be more than just that? The answer is only limited by your own creativity and motivation. It can be the most reliable assistant you could ever had for your study.
A bot learns through collective information. It catalogs and gathers data through every conversation it has with anyone so that the next time it talks it will give more value to the dialog. Hence, the more you talk to it the smarter it gets. You can give it the your craziest answers and let it correct for you with the collective answers from all the students in your class and even from your professors. The upside is that the bot won’t judge you for your answers! Imagine the great implication of such a bot to your academic life.
Are universities able to develop their own academic bots?
Right now Norwegian schools in Oslo are pulling their resources together to do just that, partnering with companies to realize your own most reliable study assistant. Surprisingly, one result from an student engagement study was shown to be 5 times more responsive compared to social network’s. Other universities have also recognized the significance of the technology by starting to build their own version of teaching assistants with IBM’s Watson Platform. Within a few years later higher education students will be familiar with their own bot and AI handling all the task and document management.
In short, bots are just one of many tools that we humanity has invented to make our life easier. They can help you with a variety of things ranging from trolling people, managing daily tasks to actually creating important stuffs and helping you learn. Their value to your life is only limited by our own imagination. What to do with such a powerful tool is the question that every one of us need to answer.
