Joke-cracking Chatbots Boost Learning Levels

A team of researchers at Canada's University of Waterloo wondered whether a chatbot with a sense of humor, in getting a few laughs out of its teachers, might better motivate them, lower their stress and anxiety levels, and help them learn more. Technology has brought us many wonderful things, but chatbots are not one of them. On banking and e-commerce sites, for instance, where these text-based conversational agents have been pressed into service to replace customer-support staff, even simple requests are often met with baffling arrays of options. For example, a bank's online chatbot recently asked me which of four types of savings account I was interested in – but it did not explain how they differed from each other. When I typed in "I don't know" the bankbot replied tersely: "That is not an option".