SIAAA-C: A student interactive assistant android application with chatbot during COVID-19 pandemic.

Abstract

Nowadays, smartphone applications (apps) are literally used in all life aspects, improving the quality of different services in addition to saving time and effort. However, the majority of currently used apps in different universities around the world are limited in their features and not very popular among students who may suffer to get useful information using traditional guiding methods. However, the importance of these apps is constantly increasing, especially in times of crises like the COVID‐19 pandemic during which people were forced to work from home and the human interaction was reduced to its minimal degree. In this paper, we present a Student Interactive Assistant Android Application with Chatbot (SIAAA‐C), which is basically a personal electronic guide that is used by students to get various and effective academic services. The app has a number of useful features including a campus map, multiple types of notifications, and most important, an efficient built in chatbot that responds to both Arabic and English written queries and covers a wide range of academic topics ranging from basic to complex. Even more, SIAAA‐C was designed to have Arabic and English interfaces to be used in the University of Jordan (UoJ), which has one of the biggest campuses in the Arabic area with more than 40,000 local and foreign students. Moreover, SIAAA‐C was practically tested in a real‐life environment by a group of UoJ students who were selected from different faculties during the pandemic peak period and the feedbacks were very promising, based on the outcomes of an evaluation survey that was answered by 102 students after a 1‐month test period.