Chatbots Hannes and Greta answer students online
Since June, KTH's Education Office has been testing whether two chatbots can help answer questions from international students.
"The idea is to shorten response times for those living in other time zones and relieve the info mailbox of questions that do not need to be answered by qualified administrators," says Sara Jaeger, who is leading the work on developing the chatbots.
International prospective students visiting the English education pages, KTH Studies, and existing students visiting KTH's English-language student website can now have their questions answered by the chatbots Hannes and Greta. The trial is being conducted by KTH's Education Office and KTH's IT Department.
"They are available on our websites and can pop up, or you can click on them and ask questions,’" says Sara Jaeger, project manager at the student services unit at KTH's Education Office.
Working in shifts
The department handles an average of 500 cases per week, and two to three employees work in shifts every day to monitor the email address info@kth.se. A large proportion of the questions come from prospective international students.
“The most common questions are related to admissions. There are many questions about different programmes, tuition fees and housing, scholarships and English language skills,” Jaeger says.
The questioner receives a text response directly from the bot, a reference to read more on the web, or the option to forward their question via email. The answers are mainly based on existing information on the KTH website.
Need to be in control
The chatbots were trained during the spring. According to Jaeger, one challenge is that they need to know a great deal, while at the same time employees need to be in control of what they respond with.
“I think finding that balance is a challenge. For example, we need to ensure that the chatbot does not give the questioner an answer that could be interpreted as an official decision. If someone asks whether they have been accepted onto a course, it should not answer yes. Another challenge is that there are so many student groups at KTH who ask similar questions but need different answers. We are very dependent on those asking the questions to ask clear questions, which we know they don't always do," she says.
Update and evaluation
The next step will be to evaluate whether the chatbots lead to fewer cases being answered via email.
"We monitor the chats and see what the chatbots can do, and then update them to make them better. It takes quite a few resources to maintain the bots, so we have to evaluate whether it provides more resources than it takes. But we hope so," Jaeger says.
Text: Sabina Fabrizi