A Smart Virtual Assistant for Students

Chatbot has become more popular in business as they can reduce customer service cost and handles multiple users at a time with a round the clock availability, reliability, and accessibility. However, chatbot uses in education are still in their infancy. At the same time, college students must recurrently navigate challenging tasks, such as building graduation plans, learning about majors, retrieving information about courses and scheduling among others. Without timely and on-demand assistance and support, many students fail to raise these challenges. To address this problem, we present a smart virtual assistant for students that provides continuous instant support to student, staff and faculty communities. In order to verify and validate our proposed model, a pilot projet has been set up involving three leading academic institutions in Minnesota; Century College, Metro State University and St. Cloud State University