Hi all!
For week 12 we are excited to wrap up the exploration of our collective OERs as we dive into Chatbots.
Our OER can be accessed through our Google site here: https://sites.google.com/view/chatbots-forecast/home
Through this OER, we aim to equip you with a deeper understanding of chatbots while showcasing diverse versions and iterations of these artificial intelligence-powered conversational agents. By examining their functionalities and capabilities, we aim to demystify their inner workings and explore the potential they hold.
This project is not limited to theoretical exploration. We also offer insights into market predictions and forecasts for chatbots, providing you with knowledge of their present and future relevance in diverse industries and sectors.
Education stands as one of the primary domains where chatbots are making waves. In the context of K-12 education, we aim to collaboratively explore how these technologies can and are revolutionizing the way students learn and teachers instruct.
Additionally, we do not shy away from acknowledging potential concerns and ethical considerations surrounding chatbot technologies. As we embrace these advancements, it becomes crucial to be aware of any drawbacks or risks they might present, allowing us to make informed decisions and ensure responsible development and implementation.
We hope that you find our OER to be a worthwhile venture and look forward to connecting with you throughout the week in our embedded discussion activities. When you are done exploring our OER, we would also invite you to participate in a final discussion, right here, based on one of the following prompts or a topic of particular interest to you:
- Do you envision that chatbots will become increasingly integrated into your professional context and how might this change work for you (if at all)?
- Do the benefits of chatbots outweigh the possible concerns and implications associated with them? Why or why not?
- Beyond work, how might chatbots impact our day-to-day lives moving forward?
Chat soon,
Nick & Doug
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Update:
Here are some of the results from the pulse-check Mentimeter for your consideration:
Great job Nick and Doug! Really enjoyed the informative and concise OER. The use of chatbots in video games has never occurred to me until now and I think it would be great for video game NPCs to give different responses for a different experience for each player.
I definitely see chatbots becoming increasingly integrated into secondary schools as there is simply too much untapped potential and so many benefits. With a class sizes of nearly 30 and a rigorous curriculum, it’s difficult to be a facilitator instead of a lecturer sometimes but with the aid of chatbots, each student can have a 24/7 personalized tutor. For example, after introducing the main objectives of a lesson, students can be given independent or paired work time to review or consolidate learning, or solve problems based on their understanding. Meanwhile, I can walk around an give individual attention to students who need support or students who need more of a challenge.
Chatbots can also speed up tasks such as answering adminstrative questions, grading, and creating resources. If the chatbot can collect and analyze data on the questions being asked, then I can review the analysis to address any concepts that need to be clarified. Problem-based learning will be much easier with chatbots that can come up with ideas, scenarios, and simulations on the spot. Assignments and test questions can be quickly generated, saving significant time and energy for teachers so we can focus on facilitating lessons better.
Roger
Excellent points Roger! Very much in line with what Salman Khan’s recent TED talk:
https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_how_ai_could_save_not_destroy_education?language=en
The potential for individual tutors is very exciting, especially with the possibility of custom avatars (like Synthesia) and personalities. Chatbots could be tailored to the students interests and background. EAL learners could also benefit substantially.
Agreed, Roger. The incorporation of generative chatbots into video game narratives would be pretty interesting. The first computer games I ever played were text-based games in the early 1990s. I remember that these games relied on the player to input a correct prompt in order to progress in the game. In a way, these early games were quite similar to a rule-based chatbot in the sense that the computer followed a script and was not able to operate outside the parameters of what the game makers pre-determined for it. A generative chatbot, on the other hand, would make for a truly unique game experience every time. It would also be interesting to see how this type of chatbot would fair in a massive multiplayer online game.
Thanks for the great OER, Nick and Doug!! This is a great presentation, which I think almost everyone can relate to as we all interact with chatbots in so many ways (I personally often see them on online shopping websites, for example).
One of the takeaways I found interesting was the difference between generative and rule-based chatbots – I did not realize there were two different types, and I will be conscious of that interacting with future chatbots. Additionally, as I am not working in the education field, before reading this OER I would not have been able to tell you how chatbots could be used in education. Reading the padlet responses, and your Chatbots in Education section were extremely informative – so thank you for that great information.
With regard to how they may be used in my professional context, I do see chatbots being used. I work in a mental health hospital, and as the years go on, the need for admission to these hospitals or use of these services is in increasing demand. Thus, I have seen, and will continue to see, chatbots being used while individuals are on waitlists (or between appointments), in that they can act as a support “person” in that they are “someone” to talk to, they are able to refer individuals to services based on the keywords they input, and more. I think while there are risks (i.e., privacy and sensitive data-related), these chatbots have great potential for this reason.
Emma,
Thanks for your comment! Counsellors are in short supply in my school division, and travel for in person meetings with students can be tricky in the winter. Are you aware of chatbots that a school division could leverage for mental health?
Something like mental health seems so personal to me! I think it could be a bit dangerous if the chatbot was responding in a way that wasn’t sensitive. Some conversations around mental health require such delicate conversation and there is so much “reading into” a situation to know how to respond. I would worry AI would struggle with that level of nuance.
While I have no experience with that type of chatbot, I could quite easily see where you are going with that. I would struggle with a chatbot that did more than lead a “self-reflection” type of engagement. I know that some people are more willing to speak openly with a pet, stuffed animal, plants, or journal than with a real person.
I really enjoyed your OER – it was clear and informative. I just so happened to have a positive chabot experience this morning. I signed up as a new Koodo user and the online self serve system would not let me reset my password and promoted me to ‘try again later’ for three straight days. This morning I prompted the chatbot with my issue (honestly not expecting a lot, but did not feel like waiting on the phone to chat to a person). The bot asked my issue, phone number, name and email and generated an email to send to me for an individual password reset. Easily reset without need to be on the phone or waiting for the platform to be fixed. Chatbot for the win on this one.
I see chatbots impacting our daily lives moving forward as a sort of personal assistant to help with the tasks that take time and aren’t super important to have a personal experience around. Setting up appointments, providing efficient directions or transportation times, ordering your groceries or mainstreaming work activities like follow up emails. As they advance I also see really amazing implications for education by offering individualized personal tutoring services for students. Thanks!
Hey Paul,
Glad to hear to you found our OER to be of some benefit. With improvements to both rule-based chatbot models, along with the introduction of generative chatbots I feel as though this will only continue to improve customer service across the board. While one can, of course, argue that the cost of this would be the loss of human customer service jobs, the job landscape has always had to evolve, especially since the first industrial revolution. So will I am sympathetic to individuals employment insecurity caused by this, I think I will also be a happier consumer and customer when needing assistance.
Thanks Paul and Doug!
I really enjoyed your OER and did my A1 on Khanmigo so have been exploring this topic a lot this term. I must admit I wasn’t fully honest when I answered the initial questions that came up in your first survey. One of the words I wanted to enter when I think about ChatBots was FRUSTRATING. Then later I saw your explanation about rule based vs. generative chatbots and chuckled to myself at the example you posted. “I’m sorry, choose from one of the below”…..”Agent”. The number of times I have typed “Agent” in frustration with the rule based bots is high!
I think the future is completely in the generative bots. I hadn’t really considered the serious difference in the way GPT answers vs. a rule based chatbot until I read your OER. Its command of the language and questions is so further developed than any Telus rule based bot. I am concerned about the amount of information it needs to access to be able to do what it does. The article about bias that is created in chatbots made me think about the way we have collected data that is now being fed to AI. Our own biases are no doubt being passed on which is a scary thought.
I really think Chatbots have a huge future in our daily lives. The simple home assistants (Google home) and even Siri etc. have been so basic this will open up a whole new world!
Hey Mike,
Yes, when we started looking in this OER I wasn’t aware of the distinction between a rule-based chatbot and a generative one. It is clear that a generative chatbot has the ability to provide a much more satisfactory and tailored customer experience. On the flip side, it would be interesting to know what type of safeguards would be integrated in to a generative chatbot for a particular company in order to avoid the chatbot steering away from the company model for customer service. I can imagine a scenario where a chatbot might recommend a competitor or their services based on certain complaints from a customer.
Really enjoyed the succinctness of the OER this week, good job Chatbots team!
I feel like much of the current conversations around chatbots are dominated by ChatGPT, Bing Chat and Bard, so I appreciated the dive into topic specific chatbots like GitaGPT, Koko and Woebot, which I would not have even considered before diving into your OER.
In response to your final prompt: beyond work, how might chatbots impact our day-to-day lives moving forward?
Much like your OER, I think the evolution of chatbots in daily life is equal parts exciting and concerning as we step into the generally unknown. In my own experience, I came across a social media post about a month ago describing some of the chatbots that are available as extensions into internet browsers. There was one called Perplexity AI, which is similar to ChatGPT and an example I included in the Mentimeter activity. In the past month I have found I have used their app on my phone to ask questions more than using Google. I would like to experiment with more companies out there but I think this one immediate change we have seen and are going to continue to see moving forward.
Looking a little bit further into the future, I recently heard of the term artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., that companies like OpenAI aspire their products to possess one day. A chatbot that can learn to mimic human reasoning and common sense seemed to be lofty goals even a year ago, but at the rate innovation is happening in this space, I think chatbots can become applications like real-time conversational assistants to perform daily tasks for us sooner rather than later. Thanks!
I agree that chatbots are likely to become the default point of contact when searching for information on the internet through browser extensions and search sites. This brings up similar monopoly concerns and lack of diversity that we experience with the major search engines like Google.
As amazing as some of these chatbots are, they still have some major limitations! I asked ChatGPT to solve a scheduling problem for me, and it completely ignored some of the rules I asked it to follow. It reminded me of a student who was so eager to do the work that they forgot to double check the answer. But it is getting so close.
Thanks for the OER! Very informative, and I appreciate the plethora of articles shared.
I think chatbots are so shiny and new within the world of education, making life seemingly so easy, but as you both exemplified, there is an underbelly of significant concerns. I think utilizing chatbots within my professional context (middle school education) is already happening to an extent, but a full adoption from a district is a ways away. At this current time, the unknown of chatbots and AI is heavily viewed as a negative rather than an exciting new tool to try, and I say this as someone who does use chatbots! I do believe that there are a significant amount of benefits, but it almost feels as if it’s a runaway train at the moment. With the wave of chatGPT, school boards seemingly do not understand (or have a baseline) how to regulate or utilize these tools effectively. If more regulations were in place at the district level of educational systems that lean into the benefits of chatbots, I think the benefits will eventually outweigh the concerns.
I did appreciate the inclusion of Social Media as a form of Professional Development. I can’t say that I have seen too much (yet!) about chatbots on my feeds, but the amount of learning that exists on these platforms in short-form snippets is impeccable. I swear I learn something new from TikTok every day.
Thanks!
Danielle, I think you highlight very real concerns with the adoption of generative AI chatbots and education as it currently stands. It will be crucial to strike a balance between pushing the boundaries of AI technology and ensuring ethical considerations, privacy, and security are adequately addressed moving forward. Until there is more clarity on these concerns, likely from the government level, I think it will be difficult for school boards to make informed and sweeping decisions.
Hello Danielle and Nick,
Danielle – your comments made me think of a major issue that will arise too… and that is of a gap that will emerge between schools and systems that adopt and adapt, and those who do not. I hate to say it, but I will: I think that private schools will jump on this quicker and more effectively than public schools. I have worked in both systems and anecdotally I can say that the private world has more support and more examples of technological implementation… I can only imagine how slow a school board will move on this versus a stand alone independent private school in the competitive world of the “business” side of education.
Maurice
Solid presentation of Chatbots, crew!
After reading some of your materials, I was surprised to realize just how ubiquitous chatbots have become. Almost any service sector business has a chatbot built into their website. I do remember when they first started popping up on sites. I was NOT interested in using them and always sought after the costumer service number to speak to an actual person. My views on this have evolved as I now find them a useful and time effective way to get simple questions answered. Your market analysis surprised me as I was shocked to see the growth potential and projections for the coming years. I knew it would be a growth market, but I couldn’t have predicted those numbers.
Much like Emma’s comment, I found the generative vs rules based chatbot video very helpful. It’s better to understand the differences between the two and how they interact with new information.
Your section on the dangers of chatbots was where I spent the most time. As a science fiction fan, it was interesting to read how fixed objective chatbots can be a danger to society as they act like a person with a one-track mind, only looking to resolve an issue and not taking the consequences into consideration. The danger lays in the AI having absolute certainty on the goal and nothing else. Some of those articles were great reads. The eating disorder group and the racist and sexist AI views showed how far off we are from controlling this new technology.
As we move forward, I can see chatbots taking more steps into our everyday life. I don’t think education will change all that much IN THE classroom however. I just feel that classrooms evolve and embrace technology so slowly that it will be a long time to get there.
Hey Simon,
I agree with many of your points. Specifically, I also feel that giving AI fixed objectives is a huge concern. That being said, from my perspective and in speaking with colleagues I do see chatbots already having fairly big impact in the classroom or at least with regards to their education. While I do concur that education, as an institution, is slow to change and embrace new technologies, chatbots are being embraced by students at massive levels. Recently I remember reading a headline that stated that ChatGPT lost something attune to 10% of site use and traffic between May to June. The article pointed to the notion that this drop-off was likely directly connected to students and summer break. Do you think that this warrants schools and boards to act more quickly in order to create guidelines to better incorporate these technologies?
Oh, I completely agree, Nick. Chatbots are certainly being embraced by STUDENTS at alarming rates, I just feel that it will take school boards and teachers incredibly long to respond in kind. I have been doing a lot of thinking about this and come September, I feel that I will be much like this class; 100% onboard with AI. I have so many AI tools I’ve discovered that I’m looking forward to using them and showing them to my students.
Judging by the heat coming off the photocopiers at my school in May and June, 70’s printouts will remain a staple in classrooms for a long time to come!
Hi Team Chatbot,
Great work on the OER this week! I found it very informative and easy to follow along with.
I think chatbots are definitely the exciting technology of the moment. I can see both the pros and cons when it comes to chatbots. I’m hoping that with time some of the cons will be worked out so that chatbots can be used in education with fewer concerns.
Pros:
-Chatbots used as personal tutors/helpers for students would make life much less hectic in a classroom with 30 students and 1-2 adults. They could be used to support students in brainstorming ideas for writing, giving initial feedback on writing assignments, answering questions to help students better understand directions or project guidelines, supporting English language learners in reading and writing, and so much more.
– Chatbots as teacher’s assistants could cut down on teachers’ time spent writing lesson plans, gathering data, researching resources, forming responses to email, marking writing for conventions and grammar issues, coming up with writing prompts or rubrics, and so much more.
Cons:
– Security/Privacy – Having one’s data compromised or used without permission is a real concern.
– AI bias – I’m interested to see how algorithmic bias and the effect it can have on chatbot responses will be addressed. It’s definitely a top concern.
– Appropriateness for use with young students is questionable – Providing answers instead of support, providing inaccurate information, lacking “personality” needed to work with young children in a caring and supportive way, and possible risks to student security/safety
– Inaccuracies and hallucinations in chatbot responses exist at the moment, which makes use in education a problem.
I am definitely excited to use chatbots in the classroom. However, I will probably put off using them with my 4th grade students until I feel more confident that the “cons” have been addressed and rectified.
Thanks for a great week of learning!
Carina
Caution is warranted with the topic of Chatbots. I think that in the next year we will start to see more Chatbot tools that are targeted for younger students. Right now, I think that the majority of tools are better suited for older students or teachers. Teachers getting used to the interaction with chatbots is essential, however, so that when these tools appear we will be ready for the consequences.
Agreed. I am looking forward to gaining as much experience as I can with chatbots and am planning to test out those designed for younger students as soon as they are available. I’m impressed with what I’ve seen so far.
Hi Chatbot Team,
Great work!
the benefits of chatbots can indeed outweigh the possible concerns and implications, but it depends on how they are used and the measures taken to address associated challenges. I heard that there will be a new type of engineer, “prompt engineer”, it indicates the growing complexity of chatbot development, and the involvement of various techniques in creating and refining them. As AI continues to advance, it becomes capable of programming and designing tasks, but the key lies in controlling it intelligently. By using chatbots in a responsible manner and ensuring ethical considerations, we can leverage their benefits effectively. Chatbots can enhance efficiency, provide 24/7 availability, offer cost-effective solutions, and deliver personalized experiences. They can improve productivity and gather valuable data insights for businesses.
Thanks Terrence! Great point regarding the “prompt engineer” as a particular skill. It is certainly true that figuring out how best to ask a chatbot questions has a major influence on the quality of the response. Given that the monetization of Chatbots will likely be based on the number of questions, or the length of the questions, it makes sense that optimizing prompts will have a big effect on the bottom line. Kind of like asking a genie for more wishes, or making each wish count for as much as possible.
Hello Doug and Nick,
Thank you for your well organized and aesthetically-pleasing OER.
For the question: “Do you envision that chatbots will become increasingly integrated into your professional context and how might this change work for you (if at all)?”
I hope so. I would love for my teachable (French), that requires so much differentiation, to be more accessible to my students. Tutoring AI chatbots could immensely help additional language learning as the software will remember the levels of the students in a way that teachers simply cannot, or that requires a lot of time of anecdotal information gathering.
One thing that I could see to be so useful would be the IB DP Language Description task that grade 12 students have to complete. If students had access to a chatbot that could give them examples of how to interact with an image in French, they could be very prepared for this task (called the Internal Assessment and worth 25% of the final mark.
I can imagine a student uploading an image, for example, a lively neighbourhood scene with a café and people all around doing various activities. Then, the chatbot could demonstrate how to describe the image, with all of the IB requirements. Then the bot and student can complete the next part of a conversation about the city and the neighbourhood. The student could even ask the questions and the bot could generate level appropriate answers. Then, come final exam time, the student would have had way more practise than a teacher of a 20+ class could ever provide.
I think that are TONS of chatbot applications available to additional language learners… See my A3 once it is posted 😉
Maurice
Great comments Maurice! I have been improving my Junior High French through Duolingo for the last couple of years. There is one area that is very difficult to replicate: conversation! My hope is for an AI chatbot that I can practice with in real time, free from the judgement that you may encounter with a real person. That said, there is really no substitute for speaking to a native French speaker to build your knowledge and understanding of idioms and common phrases.
Very interesting presentation, Nicolas and Doug!
I have to admit, I went in with a negative predisposition to chatbots as I have had some negative experiences on the customer service front with them, but seeing some of the examples and what types of chatbots are on the horizon, I have changed my tune quite significantly. Typically, whenever a chatbot pops up, I immediately start looking from the “speak to an agent” button without even giving the bot a chance. The presentation however gave great insight into how these chatbots actually function which in turn made me think about how I can optimize my “conversation” with them. I am willing to be a bit more patient next time I am faced with another chatbot!
Do you envision that chatbots will become increasingly integrated into your professional context and how might this change work for you (if at all)?
I doubt chatbots will play a large role in my professional context. Working in a K-12 school, I can see opportunities for chatbots to play a role for things like IT support or navigating MISs or LMSs, but from a day-to-day I find it hard to envision teachers needing to regularly use a chatbot for anything significant. Our IT Head would certainly love a well developed chatbot though to answer questions she has repeatedly addressed!
Do the benefits of chatbots outweigh the possible concerns and implications associated with them? Why or why not?
I do think the benefits outweigh the possible concerns. Thinking selfishly, there have been plenty of times where I have needed customer support or had a simple inquiry that required an equally simple response yet resulted in a lengthy wait time or frustrating conga line of transfer-hold-transfer-hold. Chatbots have the potential to circumvent that process, albeit at the cost of potential customer service jobs. I am always in favor of streamlining and simplifying processes and chatbots have the potential to do that on a large scale.
Beyond work, how might chatbots impact our day-to-day lives moving forward?
I was actually discussing this with a coworker the other day. It is amazing how quickly user-friendly AI has come and how quickly some of us have adapted and subsequently become reliant on it. This coworker and I were discussing how we did things before ChatGPT. Even though it is a fairly recent phenomenon, it has already had a huge impact on my day-to-day. Any question I have, any problem I need to solve, I go straight to ChatGPT for either the answer or clarity on the next steps in the process to solve the problem. Just the other day, my boss and I were discussing the need for an application to improve the organisation of after school programs. We went straight to ChatGPT and had a list of 9 programs with brief summaries given to us in seconds. No filtering through Google advertised programs or digging through page after page of search results. Just a simple, straightforward answer and from there, we could do our own deep dive into the programs.
There truly are many uses for ChatGPT! Personally, I have not yet worked it into my workflow very much, but I know of quite a few people who use it extensively for a wide range of purposes. Both Miscrosoft and Google seem to believe that their chatbots will become the main point of contact for search. Microsoft has even included an AI assistant in Office applications. The next few years will shift many paradigms!
Hey Benjamin,
I quite like the idea of a chatbot for a school’s IT department. In my own role within my school I think that this could be quite beneficial so that teacher’s are not just waiting around to find me our for me to check my Google chat in order to provide some form of support. Having a chatbot set-up could help mitigate minor issues for teachers and possibly provide them with the quick solution they need.
Hi Chatbot team, I’m really excited about this topic! In one of my previous courses, my team and I created a chatbot that provided a curated experience for students seeking assistive technology. The experience of creating my own chatbot was insightful, the project demonstrated the complexity of chatbots and the development that’s required to structure their framework. ultimately, chatbots rely on expansive and large pathways that direct the user through large data We mapped our chatbot responses through a miro board and wrote all the possible outputs it could provide our users as they navigated the experience. Creating those pathways provided to be fruitful, though was quite time-consuming. That project has forever changed how I view chatbots. I once saw them as simply a customer service tool, but after I saw their utility in another context – educational technology – realized I needed to broaden my scope of understanding. Now, I see them as especially extremely useful asynchronous tools that can be used to offer support.
I think AI and chatbots present some really interesting opportunities. I currently use the platform Coda at my workplace, Coda is how we optimize our scheduling systems and the majority of our data collection/integrity. Interestingly, Coda has recently launched an AI feature that might open up the possibility of using and navigating our company’s data in new ways. Further, discussions of utilizing the AI chatbot feature have been a recent hot topic among my colleagues. The AI chatbot feature would allow analysts to be able to synthesize data by requesting the chatbot to present particular data sets. The AI chatbot opens the opportunity for easy facilitation and efficiency of complex data. Personally, I’m really excited for the opportunity to integrate chatbots into my working life, because I spend so much time looking through data. I could use the chatbot to find the appropriate information that I need to make accurate data-driven decisions. The time that I save not looking for data, I could otherwise be spending on other tasks.
Personally, I do not think that the consequences of integrating AI with chatbots outweigh the potential benefits. I think chatbots will open up accessible avenues for learning, research, and finding resources, whether that be in the workplace or the classroom. Tools that make it easier for people, regardless of their background or demographic, to access information and understand challenging Concepts will continue to improve our way of life – though will certainly be an adjustment.
Helena,
Your chatbot project sounds amazing! I would love to hear what platform you used to create your chatbot if you are willing to share. There are an increasing number of services that help you to develop custom ChatGPT bots, with little or no programming required. It would be interesting to see how they compare.
Hey Helena,
I agree with Doug- would love to see your chatbot. I’m assuming it was a rule-based chatbot based on the response mapping you needed to provide? We played around a little bit with Smith.ai to set-up a very basic rule-based chatbot for our site. Many of the other platforms we looked into required payment to use their chatbot development service.
Great job and well done, a lot to think about on this topic as we move forward with it’s integration into many facets of education technology. I am especially interested in how chatbots can be integrated into Learning Management Systems at a college/university level. I think there is huge potential to add to student success in a variety of ways
– connecting students to college and university resources such as academic support, health and wellness, and external community resources. This could also have some AI based application, using key indicators provided through the LMS interface
– providing scheduling and organizational help through reminders and notices using the LMC calendar
– providing practice question and additional resources as requested