Artificial intelligence has grown in importance in many application areas. However, the application in the education sector is in an embryonic state, where a variety of trials has been conducted. The purpose of this master’s thesis is to investigate the factors that influence the acceptability of AI chatbots by university students in higher education which might point subsequently to the lack of usage. The study also suggests the most appropriate communication areas of AI chatbot application in higher education suggested by students. For this study, the unified theory of Acceptance and Use of technology 2 (UTAUT2) has been compiled with the qualitative data gathered from semi-structured interviews and questionnaire surveys. The study participants are university students from various countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Czech Republic). The findings showed three primary constructs: Performance expectancy (PE), Effort expectancy (EE), and a newly proposed construct, Nonjudgmental expectancy (NE), to significantly predict intention to use AI chatbot technology without education intentionality. Students suggested using AI chatbots for recap of course material, study material recommendation, and exam and requirements information.  Furthermore, this study provides a rationale behind AI chatbot acceptability based on students' generation characteristics. The results can guide universities to incorporate innovative solutions into their organization.

The master thesis deals about proposal, implementation and creating chatbot logic for e-commerce. Chatbot will serve for communication with customers mostly, but also as an online marketing channel. Thesis includes theoretical part, analysis of present conditions and requirments and also practical part which is separated in more specific subparts. In theoretical part we can find necessary informations to understand the chatbot problematic. Analysis of present conditions and requirments is focused to already working e-commerce system, which is also used as source of informations in practical part.

The aim of this work is to simplify access to information for citizens of the city of Brno and at the same time to innovate the way of communication between the citizen and his city. The problem is solved by creating a conversational agent - chatbot Kroko. Using artificial intelligence and a Czech language analyzer, the agent is able to understand and respond to a certain set of textual, natural language queries. The agent is available on the Messenger platform and has a knowledge base that includes data provided by the city council. After conducting an extensive user testing on a total of 76 citizens of the city, it turned out that up to 97\% of respondents like the idea of a city-oriented chatbot and can imagine using it regularly. The main finding of this work is that the general public can easily adopt and effectively use a chatbot. The results of this work motivate further development of practical applications of conversational agents.

The goal of this project was to create a chatbot capable of debating a user using limited resources including a discussion thread from the online debate forum Kialo. A retrieval based bot was designed and the discussion thread was converted into a database which the bot could interpret and choose an appropriate answer from. Which answer is appropriate is decided by the bot using a few key features in a given input sentence. The main features are word similarity, sentiment distance and BERT-encoding (a model for vector representation of text created by Google). The similarity of these features where then used to score claims from the dataset. Combining and weighting the scores was then used to find the correct response to a given input sentence. The most successful of the features was BERT-encoding. Once the bot had been refined it was brought online and tested using the communication platform Discord.

The development and research of Artificial Intelligence have had a recent surge in recent years, which includes the medical field. Despite the new technology and tools available, the staff is still under a heavy workload. The goal of this thesis is to analyze the possibilities of a chatbot whose purpose is to assist the medical staff and provide safety for the patients by guaranteeing that they are being monitored. With the use of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, and Voice Over Internet Protocol, the chatbot can communicate with the patient. It will work as an assistant for the working staff and provide the information from the calls to the medical staff. With the answers provided from the call, the staff will not be needing to ask routine questions every time and can provide help more quickly. The chatbot is administrated through a web application where administrators can initiate calls and add patients to the database.

This diploma thesis deals with building a chatbot for the MojiLidi system, which helps to find specialists and companies providing their services and products. Chatbot is a type of interface that is controlled by a natural language conversation. Thus, users do not need to know the meaning of buttons or forms and for them it is enough just to say request. The work describes the main parts of chatbot such as understanding the natural language, managing the dialogue, creating responses, communication channel and the conversational user interface. Consequently, such a conversation agent is created and integrated into the MojiLidi web interface from where it helps users in 4 domains.

Prior to 2012 artificial intelligence, the study of intelligent agents, followed Moore’s law which states that compute is doubling every two years. Post 2012 it has been doubling every 3.4 months. However, intelligent agents are focusing on human language, and conversation is rarely developed for education. This study investigates a student’s perceived benefits and limitations of chatbots in higher education, by exploring the relative advantage, complexity, and compatibility of a different chatbot functionality. By interviewing students the authors could establish four different themes that perceived to be important when using a chatbot, Decreasing obstacles, Enhanced learning process, Hesitance towards complexity, and Teacher involvement. Overall, this study suggests that it is preferable to start with little functionality and then successively improve. Because smaller implementations with basic functionality are more accepted and useful to students compared to complex AI functionality, and for future implementation, this is something that should be accounted for. / Före 2012 följde Artificiell intelligens, läran om intelligenta agenter Moores lag vilket innebär att data beräkningars kraft fördubblas vartannat år. Efter 2012 har det fördubblats var 3,4 månad. Dock utvecklas ofta de intelligenta agenterna med fokus på det mänskliga språket samt hälsa och sällan för utbildnings syfte. Den här studien undersöker studenters uppfattning om fördelar och nackdelar av chatbotar i högre utbildningssyfte genom att utforska relativa fördelar, svårigheter och kompatibiliteten av olika chatbot funktionaliteter. Genom att intervjua studenter kunde författarna etablera fyra olika teman som uppfattades vara viktiga när en chatbot används, att minska hinder, förbättra lärningsprocessen, tvivel gentemot svårigheter och lärarens medverkan. Sammanfattningsvis pekar denna studie på att det är att föredra att börja utveckla chatbotar med med lite funktionalitet och att sedan successivt öka. Detta för att mindre implementationer med grundlig funktionalitet är mer accepterad och användbar för studenter jämfört med komplex AI funktionalitet, och detta är något att ta hänsyn till i framtida implementationer.

Chatbotar kan användas som digitala medarbetare i exempelvis organisationer med behov av ökad tillgänglighet. Tidigare studier visat att användarnas upplevelser av digitala medarbetare har inverkan på motivationen att återkomma till dessa. Vid design av en chatbot som ska användas som digital medarbetare bör användarna och deras upplevelser därför tas i beaktning. Syftet med den här studien var att ta fram designprinciper för hur en digital medarbetare kan designas med användaren och dess upplevelser i fokus i en organisation som delvis utgörs av skiftgående personal. Den forskningsmetod som tillämpades för studien var design science research methodology (DSRM) varpå en prototyp av en digital medarbetare utvecklades. Prototypen demonstrerades och utvärderades tillsammans med potentiella användare som fick uttrycka sina upplevelser av interaktionen med prototypen. Efter analys resulterade arbetet i sex designprinciper som kan tas i beaktning vid design av en digital medarbetare med hänsyn till användarna och deras upplevelser. Slutsatserna stämmer delvis överens med tidigare forskning och bidrar dessutom med ytterligare designprinciper som framkommit i studien.

Recognizing when we need more information and asking clarifying questions are integral to communication in our day to day life. It helps us complete our mental model of the world and eliminate confusion. Chatbots need this technique to meaningfully collaborate with humans. We have investigated a process to generate an automated system that mimics human communication behavior using knowledge graphs, weights, an ambiguity test, and a response generator. It can take input dialog text and based on the chatbot's knowledge about the world and the user it can decide if it has enough information or if it requires more. Based on that decision, the chatbot generates a dialog output text which can be an answer if a question is asked, a statement if there are no doubts or if there is any ambiguity, it generates a clarifying question. The effectiveness of these features has been backed up by an empirical study which suggests that they are very useful in a chatbot not only for crucial information retrial but also for keeping the flow and context of the conversation intact.

The implementation of chatbots and service services is becoming more common. The reason for this is that they are constantly available to answer questions, no matter what time it is. To make one chatbot is not just to write questions and specific answers. Communicating with one chatbot should, as much as possible, look like communicating with another human. The purpose of this report is to create a chatbot that will be used at Luleå university of technology and that will answer questions about system science. Furthermore, the goal is to investigate which design principles should be implemented, their possible concretization, when making chatbots, and possibly coming to new principles. The method used to make the chatbot is Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM). DSRM focuses on solving the problem by creating an IT artifact, which in this case is a chatbot. The result of this work is a created chatbot and design principles that were implemented during the development process.