Problem / Objective

When a group of IBM India employees, including data scientists and communication experts, volunteered to work on a tech solution that could help students learn the English language, the challenge was to figure out what that solution would be. The team had thought about multiple ways to design a solution that teaches students the English language, especially those from semi-urban and rural areas. During the early phase of the project, there had been discussions on creating videos to be distributed through WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, considering the reach of both platforms in India. The team also thought about developing an app, but decided against it as the common consensus was that the app would divert attention and focus instead of engaging students within the age group of 10 to 16. Discussions to develop an AI-based chatbot started in 2019, when the Abheda Foundation, an NGO run by a group of retired IT professionals providing digital education to students from rural parts of Bengal, approached IBM to incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities in their learning solutions.

Solution / Approach

Professor Idiom is an AI-powered chatbot developed for Abheda Foundation, an NGO based in Kolkata. Professor Idiom is a persona, a witty professor who likes to joke and tells a good story. Developing a conversational AI-powered chatbot is a logical language-learning solution as it provides the liberty to express one’s feelings which are missing when learning from English teaching apps or tutorial videos. Idioms have been fixed as a specific topic because an open-ended chatbot could be very difficult to build. With Professor Idiom, a student can send a chat asking for the meaning of an idiom in their local language and the bot will reply with the answer in English. A conversation can be continued for 10-15 minutes to find out how well a student can converse in English. For the team of developers at IBM, it took five weeks to have the first draft ready, and between three to four months to develop the content which was the more difficult part.

Impact / Implementation

About 90% of Abheda Foundation’s 200 students are using Professor Idiom and this small number makes it easier to analyse the data and keep improving the AI-powered chatbot. The team is in the process of collecting data and this will help not only monitor the student’s progress but also improve the chatbot. Although a beta release, for now, students can access Professor Idiom by activating Google Assistant on their Android devices. There are further plans to make the chatbot available to larger users after the production release.

Source: The Indian Express

Image from Pixabay