I, teacher: Are You Ready for Chatbots in the Classroom?

A more elaborate rule-based bot might feed off a much larger data set. For example, if you connected a bot up to Wikipedia you could program it to respond to commonly formulated questions like'when was...' or'who is...' with appropriate information. Or imagine it connected to Wolfram Alpha, a service that can already offer meaningful answers, next steps, and supplementary information when asked questions like'what is the Battle of Hastings' or'what is the square root of 67567899986677654444332'. If you have an Apple device you might have noticed that Siri relies on Wolfram Alpha for some of it's answers - this stuff is happening right now.