Dartmouth turns to artificial intelligence to enhance communication

Dartmouth College is partnering with a Silicon Valley artificial intelligence firm as part of what it says will be a major step to enhance communication with students and faculty during the pandemic.

The College is teaming with Palo Alto, Calif.-based Aisera to provide students and faculty with a virtual assistant designed to improve communication and response times while learning and teaching at home.

Dartmouth’s virtual assistant, named Dart, offers support services and provide responses within seconds to approximately 10,000 students and faculty. Dartmouth official said they were looking for a virtual assistant to instantly answer support requests in natural language on a channel of choice. Dartmouth users now interact directly with the virtual assistant within Slack or on their client services portal.

“At Dartmouth, we wanted our faculty and students to have immediate answers to their information and technology questions online, especially during Covid. Aisera helps us achieve our goals to innovate and deliver an AI-driven conversational service experience throughout our institution,” said Mitch Davis, chief information officer at Dartmouth.

He said uses “are able to self-serve their technology information using language that makes sense to them. Now our service desk is free to provide real value to our clients by consulting with them and building relationships across our campus.”

Aisera’s AI Service Desk automates answers to common information/technology questions and provides proactive user notification and engagement through an all-in-one conversational platform.

“We wanted to use the opportunity that the constraints of Covid gave us to be innovative about how we deliver the information that new students need as they join Dartmouth,” said Maureen Hennigan, senior director of information, technology and consulting client services at Dartmouth.