Development and use of a smart assistant in education

Tomi Šebjanič (2017) Development and use of a smart assistant in education. EngD thesis.

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Abstract

There has been a rapid growth in the use of artificial intelligence lately. Although smart assistants, also known as chatbots, have been present for quite some time, a massive implementation of chatbots has been brought by Facebook actually. As a result, more and more companies are developing their own smart assistant that would help users solve simple questions that could also be easily solved by the users themselves. In the thesis we describe a design and implementation of a simple assistant that provides answers to questions related to the subject content (in this case the subject is the Introduction to Information Systems). In the first part we cross-check the solutions available at the time and analyze the employment of smart assistants in the context of teaching. We present the technologies used as well as the tools. The central part of the thesis presents the domain, more specifically its type and the data structure, and describes as well as defines the algorithms used. Further on we describe the development process and present a statistical analysis of the gathered data. We evaluate the solution and provide suggestions for its improvement. The test results show that the use of a smart assistant is low, which could be a consequence of the testing being carried out just one day before the end of pedagogical work. Most users were only using it only the very day they joined the team. Most often it was used for chapters search, acquiring information about the user and the explanation of abbreviations.

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