Jan de Wit
Tilburg University
Fellowship project title: Spreading the word about Tilbot: An easy-to-use platform for chatbot research and development.
The goal: I have started developing Tilbot, an easy-to-use toolkit for developing interactions with conversational agents that is built with open science at its core and will remain available free of charge. This enables students and faculty without a technical background to easily develop interactions and conduct their research. With this project and the support of eScience, I aim to generate awareness of the tool and gather input on the needs and wishes of researchers for further development of Tilbot.
The why: Conversational agents are technologies such as chatbots with which we can use natural language to communicate. They are increasingly used to support customer service, education, and healthcare. Although there are several platforms for designing and conducting research on and with conversational agents, such platforms often require extensive technical knowledge to use, or are offered as a paid service with data being stored and managed by third parties.
