IIT Guwahati’s first year students have a new teacher ‘Albela’ — an Alexa-like chatbot

• Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati has designed its very own alexa — named ‘albela.’
  
• It will teach and guide the students studying in the first year of electrical and electronics engineering on the course concepts.
  
• It is in fact, fed with the class schedules, curriculum, faculty information and exam-related questions — both technical and non-technical.
  
• The bot can also assist the faculty and staff at the institution to generate student assessment reports, closely observing the weak areas and scope of improvement in the answer copies.

India’s prestigious engineering institution Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati has designed its very own Alexa — named ‘Albela’ — to help its news entrants through the course.

Just like other virtual assistants including Alexa, Siri and Cortana, the AI-enabled virtual assistant will teach first year electrical and electronics engineering students.

The bot, developed by the institute’s research scholars, has the ability to answer every possible queries related to the course. It also has information on class schedules, curriculum, faculty information and exam-related questions.

“We have been working on its development since last seven months with a team of dedicated seven research scholars of the department. Earlier, we did the trial runs of the chatbot and started using from this academic session onwards,” Praveen Kumar, professor, department of electrical and electronics engineering told The Telegraph.

It hasPDFs and word documents to assist students. Moreover, the bot can also assist the faculty and staff at the institution to generate student assessment reports, closely observing the weak areas and scope of improvement in the answer sheets.

As for the First year students who find it difficult to reach out to teachers for sample questions, notes and references, can now approach Albela will all their queries.

The team is also working to developing problem solving skills in the bot. After which, they will extend it to biomedical signal processing, and electrical machine courses.

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