Chatbots are already employed by lots of companies to front conversations on smartphones and other computing devices. Live chat options are emerging on many websites, including at universities, and some have reported that a significant number of clearing enquiries came through live chat rather than telephone calls during August.
A recent survey conducted by Jisc is reporting a growing number of UK further and higher education institutions are deploying bots in their live environments to support parts of the student journey, and staff activities – both administrative and academic. There are also some spectacular medical research case studies emerging.
In response to the growing demand for chatbots across universities and colleges, JISC joined together with UCISA, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft to host a hackathon to help developers get started building their own chatbots.
To find out more about the hackathon, please visit the page on JISC: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/want-a-bot-of-your-own-learn-how-to-build-one-30-aug-2018