CHATBOTS
The next frontier: After driverless cars, teacherless tuitions!
What is cosine 30+ sine 30?”; “A boy has 2,500 apples more than Jon. Jon has 200 apples less than George. If George has 700 apples, how many apples are there in all?”
What is cosine 30+ sine 30?”; “A boy has
2,500 apples more than Jon. Jon has 200 apples less than George. If George has
700 apples, how many apples are there in all?” Despite studying mathematics at
the school and college level and having an MA in Economics, the subject still
gets the better of me at times. When it comes to solving geometry or word
problems, I end up faltering. The advent of blogs addressed some of these
concerns, with me posting questions online and getting replies. But, yesterday,
I found new friends to solve math problems for me — chatbots.
While many around the world have been using
bots for chatting, getting information on weather, places to eat and booking
restaurants, I decided to search for a few to answer my maths queries. I first
went to Skynet-AI, an online platform to get some questions answered, and then
I encountered a chatbot from Wolfram Alpha on my Telegram messenger. Skynet-AI
kept me engaged, with what could qualify as light banter, and asking me about
my life while also answering a few word problems. But it had limited
applicability as it could only answer the word problems it knew about. Wolfram
Alpha bot, on the other hand, could not just solve a wider variety of math
problems, but also showed me the steps as to how it hit the answer.
Maths is just one of the subject a typical
school-level student has to deal with, and there was some help available from
Skynet and Wolfram. But what about the other subjects? Could bots help me with
history or english? I searched online and found some chatbots on Telegram that
could help me with english, offering not just dictionary and thesaurus support,
but also pointing out faulty grammar and poor construction in a sentence.
Though accuracy could be a concern, it was easy to overlook this given that the
bots are still in the early stages of development.
Now, on to testing how competent bots could
be on human history. Adding Mitsuku, a bot that won its makers the 2013 Loebner
prize (an annual award given to the chatbot which the judges deem most
human-like), I asked two questions: “Who was the 26th President of United
States?” and “What was battle of Plassey?”
Mitsuku answered the first correctly, but was
confused when it came to answering a question on Indian history. On further
examination, it proved quite competent on matters related to American and
British history, even providing some additional information. Skynet, on the
other hand, directed me to the Wikipedia page on questions to which it didn’t
know the answer. For instance, I asked it who George Washington was and then
asked who Gandhi was, to which Skynet said that he was the George Washington
for India while taking me to his wikipedia page.
While bots were pretty smart in answering
questions, at best they could do was solve problems for elementary classes and
were still a bit far from being advanced learning assistants. Researchers at
MIT have been working on education bots since 2011. These can teach students
about basic colours and show them how to learn or read a story book. But with
more advanced bots being worked on like GeoS which can solve SAT geometry
questions and Sophia, a bot developed by MIT in 2004 which can take on advanced
problems, bots can certainly be trained to be helping hands for teachers across
the world, especially when students and organisations are turning towards
online courses and learning programmes.
Recently, a professor at the University of
Georgia created a teaching assistant with the help of an artificial
intelligence software without informing the students. The bot was fed with all
the entries in the blog and frequently asked questions and was setup such that
it answers only when it has a 97% surety. The students could not suspect
whether they were interacting with a bot or a human.
Which tells me that bots may be something
that could transform education in the future. For a developing country like
India, bots can solve not only the demand-supply problem but also resolve the
quality issues. While some firms like Vidya Next have been using bots, there
are still some concerns as the technology is still at its nascent stage.
“We do not currently use chatbots and would
only consider them if the technology significantly improves. We see that human
supported assistance and customised responses are the most effective way to
help our learners resolve issues and get back to studying faster. In fact, we’re
actually experimenting with adding more human touch elements in our support of
millions of online learners around the world,” said Kabir Chadha, India country
manager, Coursera.
With technology evolving faster than expected
and the AIs ability to learn new things. I could teach Mitsuku to say Namastey
instead of Hello, bots can certainly transform the education sector in the
coming years. As for the questions that I have posted , I have left them
unanswered intentionally for you to go ahead ans try them.
Source | Financial Express | 2 June 2016
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan
& Co
Best
Paper Award | Received the Best Paper Award at TIFR-BOSLA National Conference on
Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence (NCFL 2016) on April 23,
2016. The title of the paper is “Removing
Barriers to Literacy: Marrakesh VIP Treaty”
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