Artificial Intelligence in Education - Talking Virtual Tutors Are Coming

The Illinois Tech (India) posted an interesting infographic about AI in the field of education. One application, in particular, has been on my agenda for a long time: Intelligent Tutoring Systems. Finally, not only the tech is maturing but also the clients' interest is here. Infographic

We are not talking about a pre-produced talking Avatar guiding you through your average online course. Nor are we talking about a voice assistant like Siri, Alexa or Cortana who searches Google on your command for knowledge from Wikipedia. We are talking about a virtual assistant, a chatbot, who is your interface to artificial intelligence, has a live animated face and body when needed (in Skype or virtual worlds) and is the best coach, trainer or teacher you can wish for.

Intelligent Tutoring Systems are the CUI (Conversational User Interface) for eLearning & Training

These 4th generation chatbots are certainly an interesting addition to the toolbox of online learning designers. The tech is advancing fast: Botanic Technologies, for example, has already developed multimodal Avatars (text, voice and video) who act as an advisor to medical personnel or as your personal job interview coach on Skype. The digital coach -- an animated character named Andi -- actually does a sentiment and emotional analysis of your facial expressions, your tonality and your use of words during a Skype video chat in order to prepare you for a successful job interview.

[Watch Andi, the job interview coach in more detail on Vimeo] (

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Your Personal Virtual Tutor: 24/7: Never Tired, Never out of Office

Think „personal mobile virtual coach“: your personal learning tutor who lives in the net and assists your learning wherever you are - as a chatbot or voice assistant on your phone or as a 3D character in your favourite virtual learning environment. But the best thing is, those tutors don’t have office hours and thousands of students could benefit from on well-designed conversational bots. MOOC providers know what I am talking about - they'd give anything to clone good tutors for a 24/7 service.

How do you feel about this development in the eLearning space? Have you already used chatbots as a user interface to AI in your learning/training scenarios?

SEED: A Garden for Bot Builders, Designers, Deployers and Users on Blockchain

I’ve been working with Mark Stephen Meadows, founder of Botanic, years ago and have been following their work ever since. Now I'm excited to report that I have joined their partner company SEED to democratize AI by building a marketplace for independent bot developers, bot designers and authors on blockchain. I am responsible for managing Bot Community Initiatives at SEED - if you are a bot developer, designer or author please let me know - the SEED community needs you! LinkedIn

Photo credit: DigitalMajority on Visualhunt /CC BY-NC-SA