The University of Adelaide built a chatbot to solve the dreading problem of thousands and thousands of students receiving their Admission Rank on the same day. The chatbot was built using only Oracle Autonomous Mobile Cloud Enterprise, a sheet with the formulas for the calculations for the admission rank and a list of high schools whose students are eligible for bonus points schemes. It’s a very precise task that the bot performed very well and saved the university staff from thousands of calls from students the same day wanting to know their bonus points. The chatbot was deployed to Messenger, because that’s where students are. “We capitalized on the engagement we were already having across Facebook”. Which at the same time potentiated students sharing their scores on the Facebook platform.

The prospect management team was shocked at how many students embraced the chatbot in its first year. “We would have been happy with 200,” Cherry says. “Instead, the chatbot held 2,100 unique conversations with students.”

A very illustrative example of conversational done right, for a specific task, for the users and context first. Resulting in a win for students and university staff alike.

The future is without doubt conversational and has a voice.