What Is a Chatbot?

Chatbots are becoming ubiquitous. They help us shop, tell usthe latest news and weather, schedule meetings, book hotel rooms, providecustomer service, and coach or tutor learners.

Wait. Coach or tutor learners? That’s right; chatbots can befound all over eLearning. See “A Mobile Coach Can Help eLearning Stick” for an example.

A chatbot, according to Mobile Coach CEO Vince Han, is a computer system—with a personality—that canautomate a conversation through an electronic means, such as text, chat, FacebookMessenger, or the like.

The reason that chatbots are popping up everywhere issimple: People are increasingly using text services, even as they spend lesstime on email and phone calls and are less inclined to download yet anotherapp. A key benefit of texting is that nearly all cellphones can do it, even theincreasingly rare non-smartphones. Texting does not require a specific app, andnearly everyone with a cellphone does it, at least occasionally.

Pew Research Center’s “U.S. Smartphone Use in 2015” study foundthat virtually all smartphone users aged 18 to 49—and 92 percent of smartphoneusers aged 50-plus—used texting at least once during the week of the survey(see References at the end of this article). Pew also found that “textmessaging is a global phenomenon—across the 21 countries surveyed [in 2011], amedian of 75 percent of cellphone owners say they text.” And, according to Gallup,“sending and receiving text messages is the most prevalent form ofcommunication for Americans younger than 50” (see References).

In short: Chatbots are an easy way for people to interactwith companies and services using a technology they are comfortable with andalready use. In a recent webinar on artificial intelligence and corporatetraining, Han sketched out the difference between ordering a pizza using anonline order form versus using a chatbot.

To use the online form on your smartphone, Han said, you’dneed to:

Download the app
Create an account
Enter your address
Explore coupons, offers, and possibly severalpages of menu choices
Navigate multiple options to make your selections
Check out and pay, including entering paymentinformation

In contrast, using a chatbot would be simple andconversational—and wouldn’t require that the customer download an app for eachnew service used. Texting with a chatbot fits easily into the flow of mostemployees’ daily lives.

A simple chatbot uses preprogrammed responses and followsintelligent rules or heuristics to select the appropriate response. Thesechatbots can run into problems if the human says something that the chatbotprogrammer did not anticipate. A more sophisticated chatbot uses machinelearning to figure out responses to whatever the human enters, based onprevious conversations. The most sophisticated chatbots generate responses,rather than using a library of stored response. These can reference informationfrom previous texts, and they constantly improve their ability to respond to“everyday” language. But this chatbot is more likely to make grammatical errors—andit requires considerable “training” before it’s ready to chat.

So, how might any of these chatbots be useful in eLearning?

Mobile Coach’s answer is coaching and follow-up to ensurethat training sticks. But there are lots of other possibilities:

Enrollment—achatbot can be “taught” the prerequisites and other requirements and thenenroll eligible learners in the correct courses, saving human staff a lot oftime.
Simulations—thechatbot can take the part of any participant in an interactive simulation,bringing eLearning activities into messaging and engaging learners in realisticpractice conversations.
Answeringlearner questions—the chatbot can be “taught” common questions and respondimmediately to learners’ questions.
Quizzinglearners—chatbots can quiz learners on vocabulary or other fact-basedlearning to prepare for quizzes, ensure that learning sticks, or just for fun. Anintelligent chatbot can even adapt, personalizing the questions asked orinformation reviewed to the individual learner, and adjusting to the learner’sresponses.
Assessment—chatbotscan administer quizzes or other assessments and collect responses.
Onboarding—hiringa new learner can trigger the chatbot. According to Han, activating it can bepart of the hiring process; the chatbot then can walk the new learner throughrequired processes, provide links to forms and prompt the learner to completethem, provide an office tour, supply and remind the learner of benefitsinformation and registration deadlines, and even suggest popular lunch spotsnear the office.

If it sounds too good to be true, some of it still is. Themachine-learning chatbots are still in early days; in many cases, it is obviousthat the learner is interacting with a chatbot, not a human. But so what?

While good chatbots that can teach leadership skills, or helpemployees practice difficult conversations, might not be here yet, chatbots canand do teach learners about new product features, guide new employees throughonboarding, and teach simple processes and procedures. People have proven readyand willing to chat with the chatbots, and, Han says, they work.

Mobile Coach’s study of learners in a pharmaceuticalindustry training course found that 95 percent of the learners reported thatthe chatbot coach was helpful; nearly all the learners rated the course betterthan learners in previous years, sans chatbot, had rated it. A different studyfound that learners with a chatbot coach were 38 percent more likely to followthrough on key commitments than learners in a control group who had no chatbotto remind and prompt them.