Pupils in an electronic learning course at the Georgia Institute of Technology were amazed to discover that the teaching helper they corresponded with all session ended up to be a robot.

Called Jill Watson, the auto attendant talked with students about homework, course projects, and answered questions about the course, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Jill Watson is part of Georgia Tech’s on-line learning programs offering university grade courses to thousands of pupils via Udacity. According to the Georgia Institute of Technology, their bot gets up  10, 000 messages each semester, which is simple for people to get bogged down or be able to respond to all the questions.

Today, Watson powered technology is used also by a bevy of companies. The machine understanding and statistics technology had been trained to know perfect recipes, answer economic concerns, conduct client support in Spanish and power a goalkeeper robot at a popular resort chain.

Whilst the interaction isn’t completely streamlined however, people are now able to speak with bot assistants rather than humans via Facebook chats.

But the particular bot at the Georgia Institute of Technology is not like bots you may find in Facebook, it is able of more developed interactions.

Last but not least you have to consider that having a bot privately maintaining TA responsibilities through a semester might be seen as an ethical difficulty, but for this particular course it is sensible and appropiate.