Intelligent Voice Instructor-Assistant System for Collaborative and Interactive Classes

Abstract

College classes are becoming increasingly large. A critical component in scaling class size is the collaboration and interactions among instructors, teaching assistants, and students. We develop a prototype of anIntelligent Voice Instructor-AssistantSystem (IVIAS)for supportinglargeClasses,in whichAmazon Web Services, Alexa Voice Services and self-developed services are used. It uses ascraping service for reading the questions and answers from the past and current course discussion boards, organizes the questions in JSON format and stored them in thedatabase, which can be accessed by AWS Alexa skills. When a voice question from a student comes, Alexais used fortranslating the voice sentence into texts. Then Siamesedeep LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory)model is introducedto calculate the similarity between the question asked and the questions in the database to find the best-matched answer. Questions with no match will be sent to the instructor, and instructor’s answer will be added into the database. Experiments show that the implemented model achieve promising results that can lead to a practical system. IVIAS starts with a small set of questions. It can grow through learning and improving when more and more questions are asked and answered.