How to build a chatbot for your school in less than an hour

Your students have questions and you want to get them answers quickly and easily. With the rise in remote learning and education, virtual solutions such as chatbots are one way to make information available on-demand—anywhere and anytime.

you know that you can create a Q&A chatbot for your educational institution in less than an hour? To get started, check out the AWS Q&A Chatbot Self-Paced Guide that walks you through all the needed steps to set one up. You’ll learn how to:

• Deploy the chatbot in your AWS account
• Set up the chatbot environment with a sample question bank
• Enhance the chat solution with voice by adding an Amazon Alexa experience
• View usage analytics
• Enable the solution to support multi-language capability

You can also check out these short how-to videos to get started and follow along with the self-paced guide:

Deploying Q&A Chatbot using AWS CloudFormation

Using the Q&A Chatbot content designer, question bank, and trying the chat experience

How to enable multi-language support in Q&A Chatbot

Creating a Alexa experience from Q&A Chatbot

Many educational institutions have already built their own chatbots. At Oklahoma State University–Oklahoma City (OSU-OKC), staff members were handling questions from both phone calls and walk-in students, which have coinciding peak periods. Up to 50% of calls were going unanswered, and many of the questions were simple to answer. To free up their staff to focus on more personalized and in-person interactions, OSU-OKC used QnA Bot and Amazon Connect to build a solution populated with frequently asked questions. They created a multi-channel question and answer bot that’s used via web chat, mobile chat, and voice, for commonly asked questions with intelligent multi-part interaction. The voice Lexbot interaction seamlessly escalates to live staff member for unanswered questions or more complicated issues.

“Integrating the technology into our hybrid system and processes is helping us automate routine interactions enabling human time to be reinvested into the student experience. This technology is proven in other industries so we were eager to discover its impact on higher education,” said Brad Williams, President OSU-OKC.

Also read how Saint Louis University built a multi-channel Q&A chatbot and how chatbots can be used in other industries, like healthcare.

         Brooke Gleason

Brooke Gleason is a Senior Business Development Manager in Amazon Web Services Worldwide Public Sector organization, based in San Francisco, California. She helps higher education customers develop new Alexa and AI/ML solutions to impact the student experience.