College Is Hard. Iggy, Pounce, Cowboy Joe and Sunny are Here to Help. - The New York Times

This article is part of our latest Artificial Intelligence special report, which focuses on how the technology continues to evolve and affect our lives.

With college campuses, those grand convening places, nearly shut down physically, administrators are leaning on artificial intelligence to help preserve, even build, relationships with students.

“We no longer have the ability for the foreseeable future to interact with students in any way in person,” said Eric Nichols, vice president for enrollment at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore.

Both this month and last, gatherings known as admitted student days were canceled. Mr. Nichols wistfully described past years when 1,400 gathered in Reitz Arena on campus. “The day started with a morning welcome from the president and myself,” he said. There were workshops, information tables to peruse, lunch and tours to get a feel for campus.

Now, the feel must come from elsewhere. That has spurred Loyola to engage a new A.I.-fueled chatbot in the voice of their greyhound mascot, Iggy. Starting next month, committed students and their parents can opt in to hear from Iggy or query the chatbot — via text message, through Facebook Messenger or using the school’s website — about issues they otherwise might have learned about on a campus visit, like plans for orientation and choosing classes.

Across the country, college classes have migrated to online learning platforms. But campuses must also reach students for matters like encouraging them to enroll or checking on their well-being, especially now. It is elevating the use of chatbots and virtual assistants, which can simulate human conversation typically through text exchanges.

Chatbots work by tapping into a bank of human-created answers and questions, crafted to account for multiple ways of making (and spelling) a query. A good chatbot, said Drew Magliozzi, chief executive and co-founder of AdmitHub, a Boston company working with more than 100 campuses, should “model a Montessori teacher or a waiter at a fine restaurant who is essentially there the moment you need help and then vanishes into the background as soon as you don’t.”

AdmitHub, among several tech companies creating chatbots, offers campuses a framework and information bank with thousands of questions and answers crafted to be “fun but loving, informative and joyful.” Campus teams then tailor and “teach” bots by testing and revising responses to reflect local knowledge — and their bot’s “voice.”

Kara Herd, a graduate student at Georgia State University in Atlanta, helps script the campus chatbot Pounce, the voice of the furry blue panther mascot. Speaking recently from the sofa of her apartment, Ms. Herd was testing how Pounce answered those expressing trouble logging into iCollege, the campus online learning platform.

“It was sending everyone to tech support,” said Ms. Herd. “Before this pandemic, that was an appropriate answer because you could always go to class. Now you have to tweak the knowledge,” so students also contact their professor, she said.

Like many crafting chatbot responses, Ms. Herd uses an upbeat tone. She channels “the way I would talk to my friends. I would use some emojis, I would put in exclamations.” (While “very partial to the hand emoji,” she said, “it doesn’t work with Covid-19.”)

There is a line scriptwriters walk, said Katie Carroll, who manages the chatbot Cowboy Joe, the Shetland pony mascot at the University of Wyoming. “We’ll joke around with students” but avoid slang. There is friendliness, “but still that level of professionalism.”

Ms. Carroll said the school did not hide that Cowboy Joe was an A.I.-fueled “robo-pony that loved questions.” Nor did it keep students from expressing thanks, “you made me feel super welcomed,” or affection, even “I love you.”

To campus leaders across the country who struggle to reach a generation that shuns official websites and mass emails, chatbots “cut through the clutter,” as one put it, because they feel more personal. For 99 percent of queries, the bot responds in 6 to 10 seconds. (If it lacks an answer, it offers to “check with a human and get back to you.”)

“That means they can hold conversations,” said Timothy Renick, senior vice president for student success and professor of religious studies at Georgia State. That was key to helping Mr. Renick solve a problem: In 2015, he noticed more than 300 students who committed to the university did not show up in the fall, a phenomenon known as “summer melt.” Many were low-income first-generation students who, he found, “did not attend any college; they ended up nowhere.”

Mr. Renick decided to test Pounce in 2016 as a chatbot walking students through tasks like turning in immunization forms and untangling financial aid issues, responding to particular complications along the way. Mass outreach, he said, “was not responsive to individual problems,” like getting information from an absent parent. The pilot was so successful — it reduced summer melt by 19 percent that first year — that they continued the practice and have more recently expanded the chatbot’s role.

This spring semester, it was offered to all undergraduates; 21,000 (of 25,000) students now text with Pounce. The key, said Mr. Renick, is that every message sent to a student is personalized, “pertinent to them and time sensitive.” Recently, he said, 54 percent of those receiving a payment reminder text from Pounce responded and did “what we needed them to do” within 12 hours. By contrast, he said, less than 20 percent typically open campus emails.

Chatbots are only as good as their databases. For payment reminders, Mr. Renick said, account information must “be updated within minutes of sending a text.” Certainly, chatbots are especially good at procedural, “box-checking” communications, said Lindsay Page, associate professor of education at the University of Pittsburgh who has done research on college access and persistence, including on Pounce and other chatbots.

In fact, among this generation of digital natives, some students “may feel more comfortable or safer” than engaging a real person,” she said, “especially around issues that may be giving their families stress, like financial aid or paying for college.” What she sees coming next: How can A.I. anticipate students’ needs, including “building a system of proactive outreach” if say, an early test does not go well?

Ashok Goel, professor of computer science in the school of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, created a virtual teaching assistant, Jill Watson, who responds to questions about course information for classes, much like chatbots do for campuses. “Jill can answer questions about anything you put in the syllabus,” he said.

But Mr. Goel is also looking at what else A.I. could do. Like working with sentiment analysis (it uses “the order of the words, the phrases of the words” to classify moods and personality types) to explore how virtual tools could answer a human’s emotion.

“If my sentiment is one of exasperation, how do you respond to that?” he asked. Maybe a chatbot or virtual assistant uses A.I. to have “a calming effect” in its answer or suggests, “Would you like to meet the teacher face to face?” A.I. raises new opportunities — “Can we detect a mental health issue going on? Maybe we can intervene” — as well privacy and ethics issues, said Mr. Goel.

For now, humans are still in charge on campus. But they are leaning more on A.I. Not just to get information out — but to see what comes back.

“It is a tool for listening at scale,” said Mr. Magliozzi of AdmitHub. Harried humans are “bombarded with questions, 80 percent of which can be handled by a bot,” he said. “But there are some that desperately need personal attention.”

Which is what administrators at Arizona State University found. On March 16 at 10:30 a.m. Sunny, their campus chatbot, which previously guided only first and second year students, texted all 66,800 on-campus students with a link to university Covid-19 updates.

Sunny added, “As always, I’m here to answer your questions.” Some 5,900 responded.

Most wanted to know about classes and remote access to university services, said Kevin Kovaleski, executive director of provost and enrollment services communications whose team oversees the chatbot. Also, as usual, “a large subset of questions are students sharing their feelings. That is a utility in itself.”

But he especially valued the questions Sunny could not answer. Ten students responded with worries about what to do because they faced financial or other struggles or were international students unsure whether to stay. Mr. Kovaleski said campus leaders then connected each student to a live human who could help them.

“Sunny is a very efficient way to find students who need support.”

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College Is Hard. Iggy, Pounce, Cowboy Joe and Sunny are Here to Help. - The New York Times
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