Chatbot in a Campus Environment: Design of LiSA, a Virtual Assistant to Help Students in Their University Life

This work presents some initial results of our research about the design and implementation of “LiSA” (Link Student Assistant), a chatbot intended to help students in their campus life, through information and services. The focus of our research is to understand which kind of information and services are better accessed through this kind of touch point, how the chatbot personality influences the user experience and the interaction and which level of intelligence should be implemented. After an analysis of the state of the art in the considered application domain we investigated, through a survey, the users’ needs and their inclination to the use of a chatbot for this specific purpose. A chatbot was created to deliver the survey, allowing to understand both the users’ needs and their behaviour while using the tool.

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