Introduction. Imagine a university receiving hundreds of WhatsApp messages from students who want information about admission deadlines, examination schedules, course requirements, scholarship opportunities, and application procedures. Responding to every message manually can consume considerable time, particularly when students contact the institution from different time zones. A similar challenge affects online businesses, healthcare administrators, travel companies, educational platforms, and customer support teams. People expect quick answers, but human employees cannot always respond immediately. A WhatsApp AI chatbot can help address this problem by combining the WhatsApp Business Platform, application programming interfaces (APIs), and a language model that interprets messages and generates relevant responses. Unlike a traditional chatbot that relies entirely on predefined commands, a language-model-powered chatbot can respond to different phrasings, maintain conversationa...
AI Chatbots as Teaching Assistants: What Professors Should Know Before Adopting Them Introduction. Artificial intelligence chatbots are moving from experimental classroom tools into practical teaching environments. Professors can now use conversational systems to generate explanations, create practice questions, summarize complex concepts, provide preliminary feedback, develop lesson materials, support student questions, and assist with course administration. This development raises an important question: Can an AI chatbot function as a teaching assistant? The answer depends on what “teaching assistant” means. An AI chatbot can perform many repetitive, language-based, and information-processing tasks associated with teaching assistance. However, it does not automatically possess the disciplinary judgment, pedagogical awareness, institutional responsibility, or human understanding required of a professional educator. The most useful way to think about these systems is therefore no...