A Smart Virtual Assistant for Students
Abstract
Chatbot has become more popular in business as they can reduce customer service cost and handles multiple users at a time with a round the clock availability, reliability, and accessibility. However, chatbot uses in education are still in their infancy. At the same time, college students must recurrently navigate challenging tasks, such as building graduation plans, learning about majors, retrieving information about courses and scheduling among others. Without timely and on-demand assistance and support, many students fail to raise these challenges. To address this problem, we present a smart virtual assistant for students that provides continuous instant support to student, staff and faculty communities. In order to verify and validate our proposed model, a pilot projet has been set up involving three leading academic institutions in Minnesota; Century College, Metro State University and St. Cloud State University
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Most chatbot-based academic advising systems are designed with an emphasis on functionality and accuracy rather than an interpersonal communication style.
“within the context of academic advising, most chatbot-based academic advising systems, e.g., refs.[15,16] are designed with an emphasis on functionality and accuracy rather than an interpersonal communication style, which is essential in building trust and relationships.”
From Interacting with a Chatbot-Based Advising System: Understanding the Effect of Chatbot Personality and User Gender on Behavior (2022) · cites this paper as [15]
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- Authors
- Mekni, M., Baani, Z., & Sulieman, D.
- Affiliations
- St. Cloud State University (US)
- Century College (US)
- Metropolitan State University (US)
- ORCID
- Mekni, Mehdi
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Applications of Intelligent Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2020-01-07
- Pages
- 1-6
- OpenAlex
- W3007095393
- Semantic Scholar
- caf8d0f2ebd132b3db3eba6209e9f6c57566c2d6
- Cited by
- 44
- References
- 17
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 1.72
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Applications Intelligent Systems (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › AI in Service Interactions
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Artificial Intelligence in Education
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Intelligent Tutoring Systems and Adaptive Learning
- Keywords
- chatbots, virtual assistants, student support, higher education, course scheduling, scientific information retrieval
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