Which subject?

For Maths –  https://www.wolframalpha.com

For Maths - I have seen students code up some basic NLP and Machine Learning stuff over at NUS High to help in homework – texted based question and answer… basically Google for it, process the top 10 – 20 articles and summaries the answers.

There are also several startups in the AI Tutoring space.

Thank you Laurence : ) Looking at Science and Math subjects.

Usually, we get quite a few questions from students in the form of photos, over media like WhatsApp. The questions are quite repetitive, though they may not be exactly the same. I'm wondering if there are existing tools to aid us, or is this something that we need to wait for the next few years for AI systems to improve, before such aid is possible to be designed

if these are standard FAQ type, then you could build a chatbot easily with tools like Microsoft Q&A Maker. https://www.qnamaker.ai/

It is pretty easy. No coding. Even you as  a teacher can do it.

Thank you Laurence 🙂 I've attached a photo of a sample question. The Microsoft one seems to be more of answering qualitative questions, rather than quantitative. Or maybe the deeper abilities of the software is not stated online.

Any suggestion? Thank you

These are MCQ questions or even if not, you have a FIXED well known answer.

Unless you want to explain to them, you can just pull out the answer from the database and show it to them.

student> teacher what is the answer for tutorial 10 question 5

teacherbot> the answer is ......

So the teacherbot only needs to decode the question to basically "select answer from questionbank where tutorial=10 and question=5"

thats basically what chatbots do.

That's great. Thank you Laurence. This sounds plausible and promising 🙂 The database of questions / similar questions should be not too difficult to build.

Currently, the students send photos (jpeg format) over whatsapp when asking questions. The questions are usually from their own sources of practice questions. But many of them are similar to the ones that we have gone through in class.

Would it be possible currently for AI system to identify the content in photo format (maybe convert to editable format), and direct similar questions with solutions from the database to the student?

I looked at IBM Watsons' website, but it seemed to be more for larger institutions rather than smaller entities like myself.

Warm regards.