Hi Stephen.
Thanks for the tip. LearningPool are actually based about 2 hours north of me and I know one of their directors. I knew they were working with AI but did not know that they were able to connect to Moodle. I must check it out. It sounds like it is for organisational elearning as opposed to college courses. But that's where a lot start because the money is better. It may be possible to use similar techniques in college courses.
Brian
What a thread to follow...
Brian, I would love to hear how you went with that provider if you wouldn't mind sharing?
We're keen to have a chat bot aid our users/learners (in a corporate environment) in their exploration of the catalogue, using the system, and more. We've experimented in SharePoint previously with Azure's QnA Maker, and it's surprisingly handy (and has a wow factor). As you've pointed out Brian, the natural language processing and fuzziness is powerful: it makes it accessible, and gives you more options with how people engage with the platform/content/whatever. Even without the machine learning aspect turned on, in a distributed learner base it is definitely worth an hour of brainstorming to help lower barriers to people engaging with the content... sounds like a good use case to me.
I'm going to have a crack throwing an HTML block in, pointing to an Azure QnA maker and Bot as a proof of concept... if it looks good/works, I'll let you know. Keen to hear about your progress too!
Cheers,
Ant
Hi Ant.
I'm afraid that I don't have that much to report. As someone suggested in the thread, we do not have the scale to create one for supporting staff using Moodle. We did put a little money into building a test chatbot for queries from prospective students (essentially a business chatbot) based on the Microsoft engine. We used a Frequently Asked Question list to populate it. The initial performance was poor and it needed a lot more work to add variations of questions. It was not really capable of learning from the interaction with users - theses interactions had to be manually analysed. (What I learned is that the chatbot is essentially a natural language interpreter and has no deep-learning capability) Overall I got the impression that chatbots have been hyped and that they are not that powerful yet. In any case we don't have the personnel to push forward on that project and it has moved down my priorities.
Sorry I don't have much more to report.
Brian
Howdy,
That's unfortunate - was the MS engine chatbot the Azure one I mentioned earlier (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/services/cognitive-services/qna-maker/)? We'll have a tinker on our end and see - our use case is more for learners and just interacting with the platform than the support staff at this stage, so queries should be pretty basic.
I'll ask around inside the organisation about tackling deep learning off the info as well, would have thought MS would have been all over it!
Cheers for getting back to me,
Ant
