Case Study
“NED” Acronym finder chatbot at UNSW Sydney
UNSW Sydney is one of Australia’s leading research and teaching universities.
AlphaIndigo were engaged to create a Facebook Messenger chatbot to relieve a common problem for teaching and administrative staff - finding the meaning of acronyms. Addressing this very common use-case through chat is expected to be the first of many uses of ‘bots to assist staff and students.
Background
The 59,000+ students at UNSW are supported by both teaching and administrative staff, who are often faced with the simple problem of understanding and remembering what different acronyms mean as they relate to the many locations and domains of the Uni.
The ubiquitous nature of Facebook Messenger was seen as the ideal platform to distribute knowledge of acronyms, capture new acronyms, and - counterintuitively - as an opportunity to promote the use of plain language.
While there was no existing, single, central repository of acronyms, the distributed collection of new acronyms from the staff and teachers into a single place is seen as a side benefit.
DESIGN PROCESS
AlphaIndigo use a chatbot design process which has been derived from multiple chatbot engagements, to craft a persona and conversation style for the yet-to-be-named UNSW chatbot.
Discovery workshop to uncover business benefits and priorities, target audience, priority use-cases, chatbot character and tone of voice
Persona and conversation design principles for what became “NED” - the "Needy Electronic Device”. This included an emoji-centric language design
Use of AlphaIndigo’s proprietary Seven Domains methodology to ensure that out-of-band conversations were dealt with appropriately.
DELIVERY PARTNERS
AlphaIndigo partnered with M Academy brand agency to design the chatbot persona and conversation style, and with Barhead - a leading Microsoft cloud technology provider - for technology delivery of the NED chatbot. Microsoft LUIS Natural Language Processing platform, and the Microsoft Chatbot framework on Azure were selected to fit in with UNSW’s existing Microsoft platforms and internal IT expertise.
OUTCOMES
NED was launched for internal use to UNSW staff
Analysis of the take-up, success and future for NED is ongoing
Alison Hewitt, CX Lead in the External Relations team at UNSW had this to say :
“NED is an effective solution to a wide challenge at UNSW Sydney. NED is an easy, fast and portable way to access definitions of acronyms that would otherwise have required the help of others, often via an email.
With most people already using messenger apps, and increasingly becoming familiar with chatbots, a chatbot was the perfect choice.
AlphaIndigo went above and beyond to provide a solution, and ensured that it addressed the needs of the audience, and in a way that was innovative, exciting and a little bit fun for the user.”
