Chatbots: a personalised teacher's assistant or automatic FAQ?

This presentation considers a project which developed a chatbot on a university language centre website in Hong Kong. The original aims of the chatbot were twofold. First, to provide an easy-to-use system for visitors of the website so that they could find out information about the language centre, for example, its location, the subjects and workshops that are offered, and about staff members, i.e. an automatic FAQ. Secondly, it aimed to help learners, who are generally non-native speakers, become more proficient and independent language learners by answering their questions and engaging them in simple conversation, i.e. a personalised teacher’s assistant. The original chatbot that was developed was able to fulfil these aims to limited extent. However, it also encountered significant problems which led to the chatbot being re-built. The design of the chatbot will be covered during the presentation, as well as feedback from student and teacher users. The presentation will outline the steps taken to build the chatbot and offer suggestions to teachers who would like to integrate a chatbot in their own subjects. The presentation will end by answering the question as to whether given the present technology, chatbots can be a personalised teacher’s assistant providing one-to-one tuition to learners at their own pace and according to their own needs, or whether their usage needs to be more controlled.