What Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities is Articulate looking to integrate with its authoring tools? Can Chat GPT be leveraged into creating eLearning tools?

May 16, 2023

AI tools and apps are being rapidly developed.  The Articulate suite of tools could integrate capabilities such as:

A virtual instructional designer workflow that can either output storyboards or create complete courses and enable an iterative improvement with repeated prompting.

A chatbox that can be restricted to replying only to questions that are relevant to the course topics.

An AI-based photography applet that enables a photo-realistic creation of avatars with myriad poses and emotions beyond the current set of cut-out people.

What do you think?

31 Replies
Eric Barns

For Articulate to remain a competitive and leading player in the industry, it must provide an API for Chat-GPT to access and allow for the construction of more sophisticated and adaptive courses. This API would enable developers to build courses with dynamic structure, content, and questions. Developers would be able to use the API to create scenes, slides, layers, buttons, and to import Word documents to convert them into Storyline projects.

Having an API for Chat-GPT would allow Articulate to remain competitive and ensure that it remains a leading player in the industry. It would also allow developers to create more interactive and adaptive courses that are tailored to each user's needs. This could be a major advantage for Articulate, as it would help to differentiate them from other providers in the industry and provide a greater range of services to their customers.

Eric Barns

Chat-gpt' and Articulate, could be used together, to create a unique experience in content creation.

Using Chat-gpt, Articulate users could create courses which are more engaging, interactive, and visual, with the use of AI and natural language processing. This would make it easier to build courses in a faster and more efficient way, as the AI could identify the structure and content of the course and provide suggestions and ideas for creating a more engaging course.

Articulate could also employ Chat-GPT to allow users to create customised courses, with personalised content. This would give users more control over the content of their courses, as well as the ability to create more personalised and engaging courses.

Articulate could also use Chat-GPT to create more interactive and engaging lessons, by allowing users to ask questions, get feedback and have conversations with the AI. This could help users to better understand concepts and create courses which are more engaging and interactive.

Finally, Articulate could use Chat-GPT to create quizzes and assessments, which could be used to test knowledge and understanding of the course material. The AI could be used to create multiple choice questions and generate feedback, based on the user’s answers. This would be a great way to ensure that users are engaging with the course material and understanding the concepts.

Paul Arrighi

Even more powerful than just assisting course creation and allowing interactive question and answer generation (presumably constrained to the course topic), would be the ability of the chat bot integration to store the questions asked by people and the answers generated in response for the course designers to review and refine content and strategy. Totally achievable via Dialogflow, and incidentally a form of ROI as you could report on the change of questions asked...

Paul Arrighi
Head of Learning and Organisational Development

Paul Arrighi

What would be more powerful a solution beyond AI assisting course building and deploying interactive question and answering capabilities (that are presumably constrained to the learning topic), would be the ability to store the questions that people asked and the answers the chat bot-generated. Why? It provides insights for course refinement, qualitative ROI (the changes in questions asked over time) and indirectly captures feedback.

This is achievable, for example look at Dialogflow as an AI that does this, albeit at a cost.

Cheers

PA

Paul Arrighi
Head of Learning and Organisational Development

Math Notermans

All the above is already possible in Storyline with the use of Javascript. The biggest hurdle at the moment is Storyline itself and its closed environment. For example. If you give AI a prompt that gives back longer responses, your layout might need to change ( if you donot want to scale down fontsize in given textfields. And i donot want that. ) Thus you want images and other elements pushed down to align properly. Well all of this is very hard to do in Storyline. Mostly because of the fact Storyline converts text to SVG and not uses pure HTML. And its closed environment makes it harder too.

Paul Arrighi

Hi Math, I think you described the required solution in your reply :). 

What would be a fantastic addition to Storyline (or Rise) is a no code, menu driven widget that enables people to configure, within menu and parameter limits, questions being typed and restricted text replies from an AI chatbot... 

 

SId Sinclair
Change Management

"A chatbox that can be restricted to replying only to questions that are relevant to the course topics." 10000x this please!

This would be the most powerful feature to add! As we are building content we have to filter what is absolutely needed versus superfluous information. However, if I can direct an on-demand chatbot to an internal dataset on our intranet (SOPs, manuals, pages) it would allow the student to dig deeper into the content at will. Preferably this would be in the form of a shadow box that doesn't leave the original course and provides basic summaries for answers, not the entire document. The relevant links that evolve in the chat should be added to that individual's resources list so they can reference the source material if desired. -Call it the "Virtual Tutor". ; )

Ray Cole

Has everyone forgotten that Chat-GPT will just make stuff up and confidently present its made-up statements as facts? I would need a much higher confidence level in Chat-GPT's correctness before I would think of giving it autonomous control over teaching my learners. 

From my perspective, a far more useful set of AI enhancements for Storyline would be things like:

  • Every time I embed a video on a Storyline page, I want an AI to automatically generate audio descriptions of its visual content and closed captions of its audio content. Allow me to edit/correct the AI's output, but I don't want to have to create these things from scratch for every video. Storyline's AI tools should do most of that work for me.
  • I want every audio file to be automatically closed-captioned.
  • I want Storyline to discern which graphics on my slides are purely decorative and to automatically hide them from accessibility tools.
  • I want Storyline to figure out the most likely intended focus order for the objects on my slides and automatically put them in that order for me.
  • I want Storyline's AI to automatically create ALT text for every non-decorative image.
  • I want Storyline to detect whether the course is WCAG-compliant and if not, to automatically fix whatever issues it finds, asking me for help only when it needs more information to complete the fix.
  • AI translation into other languages


These features, while not as sexy as one-button course-writing, would be more useful for producing high quality accessible courses. The technology for most of the things on this list already exists, so Articulate would just need to license the tech and integrate it into Storyline.

For example, OpenAI's whisper library can already "listen" to recorded audio (or the audio track in common video formats such as mp4) and "understand" what the person is saying so that it can automatically generate timed closed-caption files in the SRT format which Storyline accepts.

Another example is that the AI image generating tool Midjourney already has a "/describe" command in which an AI "looks" at an image and outputs text describing what it "sees" there. A tuned version of this would presumably be able to "look" at any image you put on a Storyline slide and automatically describe it in a few words in a ALT tag.

Paul Arrighi

Hi Ray

I like your suggestions. They are practical.

However, I think Articualte should 'go big' on AI - what can be achieved that is revolutionary and stretches the interactive paradigm.  This is what Americans are particularly good and brave in pursuing. 

As for AI 'Hallucinating' yes that's a problem, however not a problem for all course content.  For example, a course on cancer therapy - well no not a good idea to create such a chat box integration. For a course on creating advanced spreadsheets and formulas well that's far safer.

I hope we see AI integration as an extension to how a learner can interact and push their learning along and not have a Kodak moment, where Articulate is left wondering what happened...

Roger Beckett

Is it correct to assume that Articulate's AI features will be running in the cloud?
If so, how are organizations dealing with company data likely being processed outside the organization in terms of privacy and cyber security?
Are there any data flow diagrams available for how these Articulate AI features will be implemented?

Paul Arrighi

Hi Sarah

As an alternative, will there be a way to upload private data/information and have AI learn from it to populate a chat box embedded in a 360 course while maintaining private data privacy?

Think of it this way:

  • Create a course
  • Embed a chatbot that has access to supplied data/ FAQs/spreadsheets
  • As the user completes the course, they can interact with the chatbot.  Bonus if the chatbot instance can read across all courses via CMI or xAPI...