Can learners benefit from chatbots instead of humans? A systematic review of human-chatbot comparison research in language education Education and Information Technologies

People love Chatsonic because it’s easy to use and connects well with other Writesonic tools. Users say they can develop ideas quickly using Chatsonic and that it is a good investment. Jasper AI is a boon for content creators looking for a smart, efficient way to produce SEO-optimized content. It’s perfect for marketers, bloggers, and businesses seeking to increase their digital presence. Jasper is exceptionally suited for marketing teams that create high amounts of output. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Jasper Chat is only one of several pieces of the Jasper ecosystem worth using.

• It works well with apps like Slack, so you can get help while you work.
• For example, if a specific landing page is underperforming, your chatbot can reach out to visitors with a survey.
• Therefore, the objective of this study is first to address research gaps based on literature, application, and design and development strategies for EC.
• The results mean that as students engage with ChatGPT, they acquire new knowledge, which is then processed and incorporated into their existing knowledge base.
• One field requiring research and development that will be useful for teachers is the accessibility of fine-tuning LLMs with specific course information.

Also, with so many variations, there is a scope for human error in the admission process. From teachers to syllabus, admissions to hygiene, schools can collect information on all the aspects and become champions in their sector. Users should be cautious about the information generated by chatbots and not rely solely on them as sources of information.

Access this chapter

By considering these theories, this study offers a more comprehensive perspective on the factors that can influence the adoption and use of AI technologies in an educational setting. Individual impact refers to the perceived improvements in task performance and productivity brought about by the use of an IT such as ChatGPT (Aparicio et al., 2017). The perceived usefulness, which is closely related to individual impact, has a positive effect on behavioral intention to use a technology (Davis, 1989). Similarly, these perceived improvements or benefits can also increase the perceived value of the technology, contributing to its overall appeal (Kim & Benbasat, 2006). Therefore, building upon this premise, this study proposes the following hypotheses. Alongside the positive influencers, some potential detractors could hinder the adoption of ChatGPT among university students.

They interact in a friendly way and build a good relationship with customers. Talking about customers in specific, they look for simple business interactions. A good example of this would be “online reservation.” The moment a customer communicates with the chatbot and shows interest in booking, the bot immediately leads the customer to the booking page and closes the sale. This leaves the customer happy and satisfied because the service is quick and hassle-free.

In this article, we’ll explore some of the best AI chatbots and what they can do to enhance individual and business productivity. The findings suggest that hiring for AI-related roles remains a challenge but has become somewhat easier over the past year, which could reflect the spate of layoffs at technology companies from late 2022 through the first half of 2023. Our latest survey results show changes in the roles that organizations are filling to support their AI ambitions.

The widespread adoption of chatbots and their increasing accessibility has sparked contrasting reactions across different sectors, leading to considerable confusion in the field of education. Among educators and learners, there is a notable trend—while learners are excited about chatbot integration, educators’ perceptions are particularly critical. However, this situation presents a unique opportunity, accompanied by unprecedented challenges.

For institutions already familiar with the conversational sales and support landscapes, harnessing the potential of chatbots could catapult their educational services to the next level. Here, you’ll find the benefits, use cases, design principles and best practices for chatbots in the education sector, predominantly for institutions or services focused on B2C interaction. Whether you are just beginning to consider a chatbot for education or are looking to optimize an existing one, this article is for you. This gap is more pronounced in understanding how the design and linguistic features of AICs impact user satisfaction and engagement. While studies like those of Chen et al. (2020) and Chocarro et al. (2023) have begun exploring these areas, there is a need for a more targeted framework to evaluate satisfaction with AICs in the context of language learning. To address this need, our study investigates EFL teacher candidates’ levels of satisfaction and perceptions of four AICs.

Next, it was interesting to observe the differences and the similarities in both groups for teamwork. In the EC group, there were changes in terms of how students identified learning from other individual team members towards a collective perspective of learning from the team. Similarly, there was also more emphasis on how they contributed as a team, especially in providing technical support.

These notifications can include your ongoing offers or news about the company. Propel your customer service to the next level with Tidio’s free courses. Automatically answer common questions and perform recurring tasks with AI. Say, for instance, if you have a WordPress website, you can implement a chat program easily and have it reply to all queries simultaneously. Since the interest to implement chatbots is on the rise, it becomes easier with each version.

Therefore, this paper endeavors to fill this gap by offering a more balanced and comprehensive exploration. The primary objective of this study is to empirically examine the determinants—both enablers and inhibitors—that influence university students’ behavioral intentions and actual behavior towards using ChatGPT. By doing so, this study seeks to make a valuable contribution to the academic discourse surrounding the use of AI in education, while also offering practical implications for its more effective implementation in educational settings.

6 RQ6 – What empirical evidence is there to substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed chatbots in education?

Due to AI integration in the workplace, the World Economic Forum (2023) estimates that by 2027, 25% of companies expect job loss, while 50% expect job growth. In May 2023, Google (2023) and Microsoft (Panay, 2023) announced that their products would integrate AI. As chatbots become more popular and AI becomes increasingly integrated into day-to-day life, it is important to prepare students for the future, as skills using these technologies may be a requirement when entering the future workforce. In addition, these technologies can potentially enhance student learning over traditional learning methods.

These tools have not proven to be reliable and should not be relied on to support accusations of academic dishonesty. If, for example, attendance is automated, and a student is recorded as absent, chatbots could be tasked with sending any notes or audio files of lectures to keep them up to speed during their absenteeism. Whether a parent or student wants to know more about scholarship opportunities or discover further information about a university course, a chatbot can seamlessly handle the query and direct them to the correct information with ease. In this section, we dive into some real-life scenarios of where chatbots can help out in education.

Instead of building a general-purpose chatbot, they used revolutionary AI to help sales teams sell. It has all the integrations with CRMs that make it a meaningful addition to a sales toolset. It is also powered by its “Infobase,” which brings brand voice, personality, and workflow functionality to the chat. The findings offer further evidence that even high performers haven’t mastered best practices regarding AI adoption, such as machine-learning-operations (MLOps) approaches, though they are much more likely than others to do so. Although the term is commonly used to describe a range of different technologies in use today, many disagree on whether these actually constitute artificial intelligence. Instead, some argue that much of the technology used in the real world today actually constitutes highly advanced machine learning that is simply a first step towards true artificial intelligence, or “general artificial intelligence” (GAI).

How teachers and students feel about A.I.

These platforms, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram, have largely introduced chatbots to facilitate automatic around-the-clock interaction and communication, primarily focusing on the service industries. Even though MIM applications were not intended for pedagogical use, but due to affordance and their undemanding role in facilitating communication, they have established themselves as a learning platform (Kumar et al., 2020; Pereira et al., 2019). Natural Conversational Interaction (#7NCI) pertains to the chatbot’s ability to emulate the natural flow and dynamics of human conversation. It involves several key elements, such as maintaining a contextually relevant conversation, understanding and responding appropriately to user inputs, demonstrating empathy, and adapting the language style and tone to suit the learner’s preferences. The goal is to create a conversation that not only provides informative and accurate responses but also engages users in a manner that simulates a human-to-human interaction. None of the AICs reached the desired level of conversational naturalness, as participants found their responses predictable and lacking the adaptability seen in human tutors.

Additionally, the results revealed that knowledge acquisition and application significantly influenced individual impact (H2, H3), mirroring the findings of Arpaci et al., (2020), Al-Emran et al. (2018), Al-Emran and Teo (2020), and Alavi and Leidner (2001). The findings suggest that as learners more actively gain knowledge from ChatGPT, they experience improvements in their productivity, task completion speed, and overall performance. Further, as learners effectively utilize the knowledge acquired from ChatGPT, they can better achieve their goals and enhance their work capabilities.

The ability of AI to leverage vast data and improve problem-solving provides a fertile ground for enhanced learning. Yet, the novelty of this finding in the context of AI like ChatGPT calls for more studies to solidify this understanding. Despite the growing adoption of AI tools like ChatGPT, there is a notable gap in the literature pertaining to how these tools influence behavior in an educational context. Moreover, existing studies often fail to account for both enabling and inhibiting factors.

More recently, in 2016, Facebook opened its Messenger platform for chatbot development, allowing businesses to create AI-powered conversational agents to interact with users. This led to an explosion of chatbots on the platform, enabling tasks like customer support, news delivery, and e-commerce (Holotescu, 2016). Google Duplex, introduced in May 2018, was able to make phone calls and carry out conversations on behalf of users. It showcased the potential of chatbots to handle complex, real-time interactions in a human-like manner (Dinh & Thai, 2018; Kietzmann et al., 2018). Self-learning is considered as an inherent capability of ChatGPT, the AI tool (Rijsdijk et al., 2007). This unique ability of ChatGPT allows it to conduct continuous learning, improve itself, and solve problems based on big data analysis.

Furthermore, by incorporating Augmented Reality (AR) technology, avatars can be launched and video calls can be enabled on social platforms such as Kuki.ai, thereby adding a layer of personal interaction. Looking ahead, allowing students to select specific design aspects of AICs, similar to choosing linguistic features such as target level or accent, could be a crucial step in creating a more adaptive and personalized learning experience. 7, most of the articles (88.88%) used the chatbot-driven interaction style where the chatbot controls the conversation.

Weak AI, meanwhile, refers to the narrow use of widely available AI technology, like machine learning or deep learning, to perform very specific tasks, such as playing chess, recommending songs, or steering cars. Also known as Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), weak AI is essentially the kind of AI we use daily. Enroll in AI for Everyone, an online program offered by DeepLearning.AI. In just 6 hours, you’ll gain foundational knowledge about AI terminology, strategy, and the workflow of machine learning projects. Different providers offer a variety of functionalities with the chatbot.

They offer students guidance, motivation, and emotional support—elements that AI cannot completely replicate. Lastly, this study’s comprehensive research model, encompassing multiple constructs and their interrelationships, serves as a robust theoretical framework for future research in AI chatbot usage in educational settings. Furthermore, our research model takes a holistic approach by combining both positive and negative predictors of behavioral intention. This approach can offer a more comprehensive understanding of the intricate factors influencing AI chatbot use among university students. In the realm of advanced language models, OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) has emerged as a groundbreaking tool that has begun to make significant strides in numerous disciplines (Biswas, 2023a, b; Firat, 2023; Kalla, 2023).

Article Access Statistics

Chatbots commonly use artificial intelligence to provide customer service, answer frequently asked questions, or help people complete tasks. Overburdened institutional staff can deploy chatbots to help deliver a superior learning experience to their students in a “hands-off” way. Any repetitive tasks that are data-driven can be delegated to a bot powered by AI technology. These AI-driven educational assistants can handle student attendance tracking, test scoring, and sending out assignments, reducing a portion of the workload for busy educators. Historically, educators viewed their interactions with chatbots negatively, citing that the responses from chatbots were rigid and unoriginal (Kim & Kim, 2022), only capable of answering simple questions (Cunningham-Nelson et al., 2019).

Hence, when both classes had the same team-based project task, the homogenous nature of the sampling may have attributed to the similarities in the outcome that overshadowed the effect of the ECs. Equally, for motivational belief, which is the central aspect needed to encourage strategic learning behavior (Yen, 2018). Conversely, Garcia Brustenga et al. (2018) categorized ECs based on eight tasks in the educational context as described in Table 1.

Additionally, they were asked to attach 12 screenshots illustrating their interaction, three with each AIC, to support their assessment. QDA Miner Software was used for textual analysis of students’ written evaluations on each AIC, adhering to a provided template. Student comments were systematically categorized into potential benefits and limitations following the template structure and then coded using a tree-structured code system, focusing on recurrent themes through frequency analysis. This line of research investigates how the interactive nature of some AICs can reduce students’ anxiety and cognitive load (Hsu et al., 2021) and promote an engaging learning environment (Bao, 2019).

Firstly, given the novelty of chatbots in educational research, this study enriched the current body of knowledge and literature in EC design characteristics and impact on learning outcomes. Even though the findings are not practically satisfactory with positive outcomes regarding the affective-motivational learning outcomes, ECs as tutor support did facilitate teamwork and cognitive outcomes that support project-based learning in design education. In view of that, it is worth noting that the embodiment of ECs as a learning assistant does create openness in interaction and interpersonal relationships among peers, especially if the task were designed to facilitate these interactions. Bii (2013) defined educational chatbots as chatbots conceived for explicit learning objectives, whereas Riel (2020) defined it as a program that aids in achieving educational and pedagogical goals but within the parameters of a traditional chatbot.

However, the use of technology in education became a lifeline during the COVID-19 pandemic. More research on AI-driven chatbot models like ChatGPT, Bard, and LLaMa is necessary. One field requiring research and development that will be useful for teachers is the accessibility of fine-tuning LLMs with specific course information. Although methods that require less expensive hardware are being developed (Dettmers et al., 2023), it is still inaccessible to the general public without costly computers. AI and chatbots are continuing to develop at a rapid rate and will undoubtedly be a part of the future. To better prepare students and teachers, education on chatbot use should be integrated into the current curriculums as more research is conducted on best practices.

Chatbots can help educational institutions in data collection and analysis in various ways. Firstly, they can collect and analyze data to offer rich insights into student behavior and performance to help them create more effective learning programs. Secondly, chatbots can gather data on student interactions, feedback, and performance, which can be used to identify areas for improvement and optimize learning outcomes.

AI high performers are much more likely than others to use AI in product and service development. Learners are advised to conduct additional research to ensure that courses and other credentials pursued meet their personal, professional, and financial goals. Machines that possess a “theory of mind” represent an early form of artificial general intelligence. In addition to being able to create representations of the world, machines of this type would also have an understanding of other entities that exist within the world. You should set the tone of voice, write the chatbot script, put the right chat icon, and set a welcome message to greet your site visitors.

ChatGPT Plus offers a slew of additional features—chief among these are its advanced AI models GPT 4 and Dalle 3. GPT 4 is the successor of GPT 3.5, which is even more proficient in writing code and understanding what you are trying to accomplish through conversations. Looking ahead to the next three years, respondents predict that the adoption of AI will reshape many roles in the workforce. Generally, they expect more employees to be reskilled than to be separated.

The whole platform has gotten a lot of attention because it has a huge user base and is backed by Y Combinator. Like Jasper, the entire platform is worth using, and its chatbot solution is undoubtedly worth a try. ChatGPT is a household name, and it’s only been public for a short time. OpenAI created this multi-model chatbot to understand and generate images, code, files, and text through a back-and-forth conversation style. The online survey was in the field April 11 to 21, 2023, and garnered responses from 1,684 participants representing the full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures. Of those respondents, 913 said their organizations had adopted AI in at least one function and were asked questions about their organizations’ AI use.

The free version should be for anyone who is starting and is interested in the AI industry and what the technology can do. Many people use it as their primary AI tool, and it’s tough to replace. Many other AI chatbots are built on the technologies that OpenAI has developed, which means they’re often behind the benefits of chatbots in education curve with new features and innovation. The free version gives users access to GPT 3.5 Turbo, a fast AI language model perfect for conversations about any industry, topic, or interest. The expected business disruption from gen AI is significant, and respondents predict meaningful changes to their workforces.

SPACE10 (IKEA’s research and design lab) published a fascinating survey asking people what characteristics they would like to see in a virtual AI assistant. Beyond gender and form of the bot, the survey revealed many open questions in the growing field of human-robot interaction (HRI). The instruments were rated based on the Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) and administered using Google Forms for both groups. Where else, learning performance was assessed based on the assessment of the project, which includes report, product, presentation, and peer-to-peer assessment. Concerning the educational setting, Spanish participants interacted more frequently with all four AICs compared to Czech students.

Queries before, during, and after enrollments must be received efficiently and solved instantly. Chatbots for education deliver intelligent support and provide on-the-spot-solutions to alleviate doubts, provide additional information and strengthen the relationship between students and the institution. Advancements in AI, NLP, and machine learning have empowered chatbots with the ability to engage in dialogue with students.

The TAM has been widely employed to explain user acceptance and usage of technology. Chatbot era is beginning, I wanted to ask administrators and educators how their thinking had evolved since last spring. Walla Walla, a district that serves some 5,500 students, seemed like a timely location to begin the conversation. After blocking student access to ChatGPT in February, Walla Walla administrators told me they unblocked it last month and are now embracing A.I. Understanding why students may inappropriately use AI tools can shed light on the importance of revising your current assignments and assessments.

Winkler and Söllner (2018) reviewed 80 articles to analyze recent trends in educational chatbots. The authors found that chatbots are used for health and well-being advocacy, language learning, and self-advocacy. Chatbots are either flow-based or powered by AI, concerning approaches to their designs. Chatbots, also known as conversational agents, enable the interaction of humans with computers through natural language, by applying the technology of natural language processing (NLP) (Bradeško & Mladenić, 2012). In fact, the size of the chatbot market worldwide is expected to be 1.23 billion dollars in 2025 (Kaczorowska-Spychalska, 2019). In the US alone, the chatbot industry was valued at 113 million US dollars and is expected to reach 994.5 million US dollars in 2024 Footnote 1.

The concept of self-learning in AI involves the system’s ability to learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed (Bishop & Nasrabadi, 2006). Such an AI-based tool, like ChatGPT, can evolve its capabilities over time, making it a highly efficient tool for knowledge acquisition and application among students (Berland et al., https://chat.openai.com/ 2014). Berland et al. (2014) pointed out that self-learning in AI can provide personalized learning experiences, thereby helping students to acquire and retain knowledge more effectively. This is due to the AI’s ability to adapt its responses based on past interactions and data, allowing for more targeted and relevant knowledge acquisition.

Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to computer systems capable of performing complex tasks that historically only a human could do, such as reasoning, making decisions, or solving problems. Learn what artificial intelligence actually is, how it’s used today, and what it may do in the future. You should remember that bots also have some challenges that you will need to overcome. These include timely setup and maintenance, as well as, lack of emotions in the conversation. Now it’s time to decide how you will measure the chatbot’s success by setting up metrics.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the theory and development of computer systems capable of performing tasks that historically required human intelligence, such as recognizing speech, making decisions, and identifying patterns. AI is an umbrella term that encompasses a wide variety of Chat GPT technologies, including machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP). The survey items underwent a rigorous validation process involving academic experts and a pilot study with a subset of the target population to refine their clarity and applicability.

Among them, ChatGPT and Google Bard are among the most profound AI-powered chatbots. It was first announced in November 2022 and is available to the general public. ChatGPT’s rival Google Bard chatbot, developed by Google AI, was first announced in May 2023. Both Google Bard and ChatGPT are sizable language model chatbots that undergo training on extensive datasets of text and code. They possess the ability to generate text, create diverse creative content, and provide informative answers to questions, although their accuracy may not always be perfect.