Artificial Intelligence (AI) is showing great drive and promise in higher education. Yet the focus of AI has largely been on enhancing the learning experience, not in the registration and enrollment offices where challenges remain. Prospective students have difficulty navigating the ins and outs of financial aid, while current students often struggle with class enrollment. That’s where an artificial intelligence conversational interface can provide assistance to students in enrollment and registration.
What is artificial conversational interface (AI CUI)?
To understand our current relationship with AI we must look to the past. There has always been some sort of sci-fi mystery between man and machine. For decades scientists have tried to interact with computers through natural human commands. In 1960, ELIZA was created in an MIT AI Lab to emulate the behavior of a psychiatrist. Eliza was then followed by PARRY in 1972 and Jabberwacky in 1988. The challenge of early CUIs was that the software powering them was ruled-based. This meant that programmers had to predict and include every form that a command could be given to the application. As you can imagine, this wasn’t very efficient as the code became too convoluted and the developers often missed many ways the user might interact with the program. This is where natural language programming (NPL) and machine learning evolved the chatbot to what we know today. According to Gartner, “AI conversational interfaces are a subset of conversational user interfaces (CUIs) in general, which is a high-level design model in which user and machine interactions primarily occur in the user’s spoken or written natural language.”
To break this down, a CUI is interacting with a computer on human terms. CUI allows the user to tell the computer what to do. Think of the CUI as an in-store retail associate with predefined scripts to respond to customer’s questions. CUI takes two forms: voice assistants and chatbots. Some common voice assistant CUIs in our current landscape are Alexa, Siri, and Cortana, while a common chatbot is Slack’s chatbot.
