Botsify is an education-focused chatbot that aims to help better engage students without costing teachers and admin as much time.
The idea is to offer a space in which students can engage and get what they need, without each individually needing to go to the teacher, who has to repeat answers.
Since this platform interacts with students digitally, there is a record that can be used by educators as a means to record and analyze student progress.
Could Botsify be the right chatbot for your education institution?
What is Botsify?
Botsify is a chatbot for education, so it offers a digital space for questions and answers between students and an automated response system. Some call this artificial intelligence, but in this instance it is more a smart list of questions and answers that's automated.
Despite some very poor English on the company's website, the app itself seems to have been made by professionals, built at scale, and used in countries around the globe.
The system offers a number of services including enrollment automation, a personalized learning environment for students, and an automated guide with feedback.
As mentioned, it also offers an analytics screen for teachers. This can mean it handles a simple task such as collecting student feedback, or more complex data like monitoring trending issues.
How does Botsify work?
Botsify uses a chatbot builder to tailor the result to the needs of the institution that is buying. This can then be implemented in a number of ways including on a website, for Facebook Messenger, for WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram for SMS, and more.
One of the basic system features available to teachers is being able to engage students live. It can also offer a way of directly sending personalized bulk messages or the ability to offer student assistance when the teacher is unavailable, such as outside of school hours.
Building the bot is a relatively straightforward process as you are taken through a checklist of options that you may want to include in your service. The end result is a user-friendly interface that students have likely used in their apps already. Usefully, there are 24 templates in the interface when building a chatbot which makes it relatively simple to get started, even for novices.
How detailed you want the bot to be is up to you and simply requires you to program in more options as you need. If you have the time this can be a very, very comprehensive student engagement tool.
What are the best Botsify features?
Botsify is conversational, so the responses received by students use easy-to-understand and friendly language so it feels as if they're engaging with a real person. Crucially, this also works in multiple languages, although it won't directly translate so that is an area that could be improved as some of the competition have done.
Education with the chatbot is broad as this has a number of options such as allowing you to collect student feedback or admission forms and assignments, but also to take quizzes built by you as needed. The results of these are all clearly presented in an analysis window so the data and trends can be picked out easily.
The chatbot supports interactions via written format but also using chat with voice. Plus, there is support for attachments, allowing students to upload pertinent files but also for teachers and admins to leave content to download as needed.
This system does work with Google Sheets, which is a really helpful feature if you already have quizzes or forms setup in there that you want to use with the chatbot service.
How much does Botsify cost?
Botsify offers a free trial so you can get started right away. You are required to give your banking details to begin this 14-day trial but there is no commitment so you can cancel if you don't want to continue. There are then three plans: Do it Yourself, Done For You, and Custom.
Do it Yourself is charged at $49/month, which gets you two chatbots, 5,000 users per month, and unlimited stories, conversations, forms, and media.
Done For You is $149/month, and offers five chatbots, unlimited users, dev assists, dashboard access, social media integrations, plus a WhatsApp chatbot with 1,000 free conversations per month.
Custom is charged at a case-by-case basis and will get you more options to personalize the needs across schools or districts as required.
Botsify best tips and tricks
Submit work
Use the system to have students submit their assignments as uploads, with all questions, answers -- and excuses -- dealt with by the bot.
Modern mailout
Use the bot to send bulk messages so you know who will receive them and can even see, in the case of WhatsApp and Messenger, when it has been read.
Welcome your class
Create a bot for new classes and even new modules allowing students to learn and enquire before they begin so they feel ready and comfortable when it comes to start.
