Top 5 Use Cases of Conversational AI in Education in 2024

Education is one of the top 5 industries that is currently benefiting from chatbots and conversational AI applications. This is partially due to learning becoming more mobile, and institutions embarking on a digital transformation in order to digitize teaching. 

Conversational AI is on track to, arguably, make education more accessible, feasible, and streamlined than before through personalized teaching, special content tailoring, and instant, round-the-clock support to students.

Our aim in this article is to discuss more in detail how education can take advantage of conversational AI.

Why is conversational AI important for education?

It is estimated that the most relevant sentiment amongst (American) students at school is boredom. Education providers are leveraging AI and its derivatives to organically engage through:

• Virtual collaboration platforms, 
• Quiz applications, 
• Chatbots,
• Interactive learning methods (virtual or augmented reality), and so forth to offer a more engaging education.

Thanks to natural language processing, conversational AI applications can process students’ questions and deliver human-sounding responses

How is conversational AI used in education?

Conversational AI applications have numerous use cases in education, including:

• Personalized teaching: Conversational AI can deliver personalized content for each student based on their individual interests. In addition, conversational AI, coupled with ML models, can adjust the teaching based on the growing complexity of the student’s queries. Personalized teaching can optimize a student’s performance at school. 
• Artificial TA: Conversational bots can act as a stand-in teaching assistant (TA) by responding to questions, instantly evaluating assessments, delivering feedback, and suggesting suitable studying material.
• Instant support: A student can reach out to the chatbot of their school/university to get details about courses, deadlines, and professors. The chatbot could also recommend suitable universities based on the high schooler’s GPA, extracurricular activities, field of study, geographical preference, etc.
• Special tailoring: Conversational AI can be used as:
  • Personal coaches: A conversational AI/chatbot can coach teachers on how to deal with students with special needs and recommend engaging teaching strategies (using colors, videos, or attractive teaching material) in order to get their points across.
  • Study buddy: During a virtual class, a chatbot or a conversational AI application can interact with students with special needs in a conversational manner based on their physician’s recommendations, recognize their intents and queries, and introduce the educational material accordingly.

What are the case studies of conversational AI in education?

The following is a list of some case studies of using conversational AI in education:

1. Georgia Institute of Technology used a chatbot named Jill Watson — created by IBM’s Watson — as one of the nine TAs for a 300-student classroom. “Ms. Watson” was able to answer approximately 10,000 messages a semester with a 97% success rate. “Ms. Watson” was so human-like that it took months before one student figured out, through a small technicality, that his TA was actually a bot rather than a human.
2. Georgia State University introduced an AI chatbot, Pounce, that prevented 324 students who claim they would have dropped out had it not been for the chatbot’s guidance. Pounce was able to answer questions round-the-clock, through text, on topics regarding financial aid, scholarship applications’ deadlines, and course enrollment inquiries.
3. IBM Research and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed an AI-powered assistant with an immersive virtual classroom to make students feel as though they are in a restaurant in China to help them practice speaking Mandarin with an AI agent.

For more on conversational AI

To learn more about conversational AI, read:

• In-Depth Guide to the 4 Types of Conversational AI
• 90+ Chatbot / Conversational AI Statistics: Market Size, Adoption
• 8 Epic Chatbot / Conversational Bot Failures

Finally, if you believe your business can benefit from the implementation of conversational AI, we guide you to our Conversational AI Hub where we have a data-driven list of vendors.

And we can guide you through the process: