We’re proud to launch EBA Assistant, the first massively used AI-based virtual assistant in Turkey that answered the highest number of questions ever, since its launch day and helps students, teachers and parents about their questions on the remote learning system of Turkey.

How was EBA Assistant initiated?

Covid-19 had already made history as a pandemic that has affected the whole world so deeply in such a short period time. Due to this pandemic, education and training was interrupted temporarily in many countries. UNESCO reports that the number of countries interrupted education, in order to prevent the spread of the disease, across the country is 188, which means that 91% of the worldwide student population cannot go to their schools. Many countries have started implementing various remote education models to minimize the negative effects on education and Turkey has been among these countries with the EBA (Education Information Network) system.

Since this issue of coronavirus started to affect our daily lives, we have started to think about what we can do and how we can dedicate our technology so that we can overcome this problem as a society more easily by adapting our systems. We think that EBA Assistant, which we have developed for the Ministry of National Education, will create a great value for more than 18 million students and their parents and more than 1 million teachers to use EBA more effectively.

EBA Assistant is not an ordinary virtual assistant project for us, but it means a  valuable contribution to this great struggle for our children and youth, who are the future of our country, to continue their education remotely. For this reason, EBA Assistant has a very special and unique position among the projects we have realized so far.

What is EBA Assistant?

EBA Assistant is a digital assistant developed to support the users of EBA, Turkey’s remote education system. In the first phase, it provides answers approximately 100 different questions in 10 main topics defined by the experts of the Ministry of Education. The most important value that it creates is that the users can access the information instantly without navigating through the site and between different menus. Thanks to EBA Assistant, students, teachers and parents find answers to their questions such as setting/resetting a password, learning the curriculum, learning about the exams, meeting with the teachers and accessing the content of the previous lessons, by just writing as if they chat with a human. It is possible to reach EBA Assistant through eba.gov.tr – the official website of EBA.

What is the technology behind it?  

EBA Assistant, which we developed with our artificial intelligence technology, answers questions about the usage of EBA system and ensures that the users receive more benefit from the system. 

EBA Assistant, which we put into practice in cooperation with the Ministry of National Education, was realized in a very short time with the intensive efforts of the ministry officials and our experience in artificial intelligence technologies. The bot was not developed with a rule-based infrastructure, but with the possibilities of our natural language processing and machine learning technologies. Offering a much better user experience than rule-based bots, EBA Assistant will be able to answer questions better as users continue to ask. Natural language processing technology helps the assistant understand the free texts like a human and provide the correct answer. In other words, even when an elementary school student interacts EBA Assistant as if he/she is talking to a friend, the assistant can understand and answer it. On the other hand, machine learning technology, enables the system to be continuously trained with new questions.

Who is the target audience? Which questions does it answer? 

EBA users can benefit from EBA Assistant whether they are students, teachers or parents. When they ask questions like “How do I get my password, how do I enter the system, what lessons are scheduled for the 3rd grade, how can I reach the curriculum / the lesson plan, can I ask a question to my teacher?”, they can get the correct answer instantly. For example, when you want to see the curriculum for your 4th grade son in primary school, the assistant crawls it and informs you in seconds. If you are going to set a password for the first time, it guides you in a very simple, clear and seamless way about the steps. EBA Assistant is trained with the most frequent questions from users, so it can quickly answer them. Therefore, EBA Assistant makes life very easy for the users and enable them to focus on only the  education offered by EBA, instead of dealing with how to use the platform.

EBA Assistant launched on April 13,  has responded more than 10 million messages of 2.8 million users within the first 5 weeks. Users received answers to their queries on more than 1000 different topics. 85% of the usage has been through mobile. Citizens from 81 provinces of Turkey interacted with the Assitant and İstanbul, Ankara, Adana, İzmir ve Diyarbakır have been the top user provinces.

A best practice of public and private sector partnership

We think that EBA Assistant is a best practice of a public-private sector cooperation to find an urgent solution for an unexpected need for the benefit the whole society. As CBOT, our priority in this project is to ensure that the students do not get left behind their schedule and there is no learning gap. In this sense, the EBA Assistant project should be considered as a best practice of  a value creating cooperation not only in Turkey but within the global market as well.

Because of this global epidemic situation we are going through, there is no doubt that our compulsory self-isolation will accelerate digitalization, and will make it deepened vertically as well as penetrated into more people’s lives. As CBOT, we are ready to meet such a wave with our artificial intelligence infrastructure. We will continue to support both public and private institutions so that they can serve customers, citizens and employees better and do their jobs more efficiently.