February Newsletter

February at the Hubert factory is occupied by primarily these four tasks:

1. Talking to our valued users about the functionality of the latest version.
2. Pushing new updates and fixes
3. Expanding Hubert’s knowledge-base and vocabulary.
4. Planning some design changes.

The Hubert beta 2 has been out for a couple of weeks now and seems to be well received among both educators and students. There are still a few fixes that need to be implemented for the start, stop, continue-evaluation to work perfectly. But we are starting to feel really pleased with how Hubert handles these questions and are anxious to get started with a way for users to choose questions for themselves.

With the new version came some updated back-end functionality that has made it really easy to teach Hubert new intents. As we discover questions and statements that Hubert doesn’t understand, we are now able to train him on a few similar examples, test it out, and push changes within an hour or two. Unfortunately, our product team has to sleep now and again, but Hubert is rapidly becoming smarter every day.

Here are a few examples of questions that Hubert now understands and can act on:

-Who are you?
-How does this work?
-Help!
-Is this anonymous?
-Are we done yet?
-What do you mean?
-I want to add more
-What teacher sent this?
-For what course?
-Tell me a joke

Another thing that we’ve noticed and tried to address, is that some students have a habit of not being too constructive in their feedback. Now, when Hubert asks about what could be improved and is met by ‘everything’ or ‘nothing’, he follows up on that by asking the student to be more specific or to think a bit harder. This way of drilling down deeper is exactly why it’s so very useful to use a chatbot to collect responses over a survey.

Design-wise, we’re looking into updating the design on the start page/dashboard to make the interface a bit smoother. With that comes a better way of showing how to best use Hubert and an example-evaluation to show how the responses look from a typical class of 32 students.
We are also starting to realize that, no matter how fun it is, we can’t keep building Hubert for free forever. We’ve been thinking of a paid version for heavy users. Hope some of you will support us in our efforts to replace boring surveys in education.

February is as most of you know, the start of the peak season for mid-term evaluations, and we have taken every precaution to make sure our systems are good to go for the oncoming traffic. Your job is just to press the button, wait for responses to start pouring in and then take appropriate action on well-organized data.

So what are you waiting for?

Oh, and don’t forget that you can sort your own open-ended course evaluation comments with Hubert as well. Just click on the ‘Upload’ tab when logged in to your account.

Peace out,
The Hubert crew

Originally published at blog.hubert.ai on February 16, 2018.

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February Newsletter was originally published in Hubert.ai on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.