IIT Guwahati Develops AI-Powered Chatbot ALBELA To Support 1st Year Students

In an interesting invention that will help student communication, a team of postgraduate students from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati are developing an artificial intelligence-enabled chatbot called ALBELA. Created by the researchers from the Department of EEE and their faculty members, this chatbot is going to be used to teach and support the first-year students of Electrical & Electronics Engineering (EEE). IIT Guwahati said in a statement that the AI chatbot is projected to be a suitable mechanism also capable of addressing the queries and doubts that each of the approximately 850 students pursuing EEE at the Institute may have. Talking about the chatbot ALBELA, Praveen Kumar, Professor, Department of EEE, IIT Guwahati, said, “We have been working on its development since last 7 months with a team of dedicated 7 research scholars of the department. Earlier we did the trial runs of the chatbot, and started using from this academic session onwards. The response from the students has been overwhelming and we hope that this will become the new normal in the near future. Prof Rohit Sinha, Head EEE Department, and the team IBM have extended their continuous support for this activity.” How is ALBELA helping students at IIT Guwahati? Providing an easy interface to find details of classes and tutorials: Students can find their class schedule, tutorial schedule, examination queries, and more through a simple AI-based chat window. Students at times may hesitate to approach an instructor regarding their queries, but, with this chat-based system, students can clear their doubts, both technical and non-technical. Doubts related to course content: First-Year students can have numerous doubts related to content such as preferred textbooks, reference books, notes, sample questions, etc. The Chatbot is trained to answer all the queries related to the above. An easy and fascinating interface: Use of Chatbot to clear doubts of the students can be fascinating to students, increasing their interest in the subject. This may result in better learning outcomes, with the students enjoying the course even more.