With the advent of Web 2.0, new forms of journalism arose, paving the way for the implementation of computational and automatization processes in all aspects of mass communication. As such, chatbots have already been adapted in the news media platforms bringing forward a series of issues and effects upon journalistic narrative, content and professional practices. This paper presents the role of chatbots and their characteristics, discusses the application of different types of chatbots in the news media and presents a theoretical overview of the advantages and disadvantages regarding their adaptation in journalism, as well as key ethical concerns connected to the emergence of this new journalistic narrative.

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Chatbots on the Rise: A New Narrative in Journalism

This work introduces a new paradigm of monitoring student attendance using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based on the Internet of Thing (IoT). Educational institutes are concerned about student irregular attendance. Truancy can affect a student’s overall academic performance. The traditional method of taking attendance by calling names or signing on paper is very time consuming and inefficient. RFID based attendance system using IoT system is one of the solutions to handle the problem. The proposed work comprises of two most popular trend in technology research; IoT and RFID.

IoT Based Smart Attendance System (SAS) Using RFID

Just as SARS-CoV-2, a new form of coronavirus continues to infect a growing number of people around the world, harmful misinformation about the outbreak also continues to spread. With the goal of combating misinformation, we designed and built Jennifer–a chatbot maintained by a global group of volunteers. With Jennifer, we hope to learn whether public information from reputable sources could be more effectively organized and shared in the wake of a crisis as well as to understand issues that the public were most immediately curious about. In this paper, we introduce Jennifer and describe the design of this proof-of-principle system. We also present lessons learned and discuss open challenges. Finally, to facilitate future research, we release COVID-19 Question Bank, a dataset of 3,924 COVID-19-related questions in 944 groups, gathered from our users and volunteers.

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Jennifer for COVID-19: An NLP-Powered Chatbot Built for the People and by the People to Combat Misinformation

Managing non-trivial internet-of-things systems with conversational assistants: A prototype and a feasibility experiment

This work compares user collaboration with conversational personal assistants vs. teams of expert chatbots. Two studies were performed to investigate whether each approach affects accomplishment of tasks and collaboration costs. Participants interacted with two equivalent financial advice chatbot systems, one composed of a single conversational adviser and the other based on a team of four experts chatbots. Results indicated that users had different forms of experiences but were equally able to achieve their goals. Contrary to the expected, there were evidences that in the teamwork situation that users were more able to predict agent behavior better and did not have an overhead to maintain common ground, indicating similar collaboration costs. The results point towards the feasibility of either of the two approaches for user collaboration with conversational agents.

Different but Equal: Comparing User Collaboration with Digital Personal Assistants vs. Teams of Expert Agents.

Build over 8 chatbots and conversational user interfaces with leading tools such as Chatfuel, Dialogflow, Microsoft Bot Framework, Twilio, Alexa Skills, and Google Actions and deploying them on channels like Facebook Messenger, Amazon Alexa and Google Home Key Features Understand the different use cases of Conversational UIs with this project-based guideBuild feature-rich Chatbots and deploy them on multiple platforms Get real-world examples of voice-enabled UIs for personal and home assistanceBook Description Conversation as an interface is the best way for machines to interact with us using the universally accepted human tool that is language. Chatbots and voice user interfaces are two flavors of conversational UIs. Chatbots are real-time, data-driven answer engines that talk in natural language and are context-aware. Voice user interfaces are driven by voice and can understand and respond to users using speech. This book covers both types of conversational UIs by leveraging APIs from multiple platforms. We'll take a project-based approach to understand how these UIs are built and the best use cases for deploying them. We'll start by building a simple messaging bot from the Facebook Messenger API to understand the basics of bot building. Then we move on to creating a Task model that can perform complex tasks such as ordering and planning events with the newly-acquired-by-Google Dialogflow and Microsoft Bot framework. We then turn to voice-enabled UIs that are capable of interacting with users using speech with Amazon Alexa and Google Home. By the end of the book, you will have created your own line of chatbots and voice UIs for multiple leading platforms. What you will learn Design the flow of conversation between the user and the chatbot Create Task model chatbots for implementing tasks such as ordering foodGet new toolkits and services in the chatbot ecosystem Integrate third-party information APIs to build interesting chatbots Find out how to deploy chatbots on messaging platforms Build a chatbot using MS Bot Framework See how to tweet, listen to tweets, and respond using a chatbot on Twitter Publish chatbots on Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa Who This Book Is For This book is for developers who are interested in creating interactive conversational UIs/Chatbots. A basic understanding of JavaScript and web APIs is required.

Hands-On Chatbots and Conversational UI Development: Build chatbots and voice user interfaces with Chatfuel, Dialogflow, Microsoft Bot Framework, Twilio, and Alexa Skills

Srini Janarthanam

Papers

Hands-On Chatbots and Conversational UI Development: Build chatbots and voice user interfaces with Chatfuel, Dialogflow, Microsoft Bot Framework, Twilio, and Alexa Skills