Comparison of Voice Based Virtual Assistants fostering Indian Higher Education – A Technical Perspective

Abstract

To meet expectations of stakeholders in Education 4.0, the inclination towards acceptance, testing, and implementation of Voice Assistants has increased at a faster pace in western universities. This study has been done to understand the present level of performance and capability of voice assistants in answering the basic queries of users from Indian Higher education sector. Three voice assistants namely Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, and Google Assistant have been considered for a survey in which 100 students participated and tested the performance of these three voice assistants by asking basic questions related to admission and examination. A set of total 14 questions has been selected to be asked by user in both the categories. Category 1 related to Admissions contained 7 little complex questions while category 2 related to Examination had 7 direct and simpler questions. Responses of the users were noted down and after careful analysis, the explanations have been deduced about performance of these voice assistants in factors considered: understanding of voice and language of user, understanding of basic meaning of the question, request to repeat the question, whether the answer was given by voice assistants and quality of the answer received. As per the results, various observations have been noted that may further help Artificial Intelligence developers and programmers to understand the success and failure of voice assistants and accordingly bring improvements in their performance level. This study also helps in knowing about huge applications, contributions and benefits these voice assistants offer to the stakeholders. Once the improvements are incorporated by the developers, marketing professionals can boost the absorption and use of voice assistants in massive higher education sector of India by convincing the important stakeholders that also paves a way to tap into more undiscovered possibilities about use of Artificial Intelligence in higher education system at global level.