Niyati Kottury and Nirav Kottury, rising 10th graders from Briar Woods High School and Academies of Loudoun, and founders of STEMStart, a 501 C (3) non-profit organization with the mission to close the STEM gap. Deloitte Consulting (2018) predicts that 3.5M STEM jobs in the US will go unfilled due to shortage of high school graduates with STEM skills. Factors such as the fundamental skills gap, the belief gap, the geographic gap, the demographic gap, and the post-secondary education skills gap, are the main drivers behind the STEM gap. Knowing that the STEM skills gap is a nationwide problem, Niyati and Nirav Kottury have decided to be change agents by being part of the solution and establishing STEMStart in early 2019.
STEMStart Inc conducted a STEMStart Dialogflow Bootcamp on April 10th, 2021 from 1:00PM to 5:00PM virtually. For this event, STEMStart partnered with Verizon Communications in developing and delivering the content virtually (via Zoom platform). As part of the bootcamp, students conveyed the need to close the STEM skills gap. The founder of STEMStart Inc., Niyati Kottury, and the co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer, Nirav Kottury reiterated the need in closing the skills gap and motivated students to actively recruit more students in pursuing STEM careers. STEMStart Inc considered running the STEMStart Dialogflow Bootcamp since companies continue to implement chatbot services; by 2025 there will be a $1.3 billion dollar investment in the chatbot industry, but the US is projected to have 65% talent shortage (per AI multiple research). Dialogflow is a Google-owned framework that enables users to develop human-computer interaction technologies that can support Natural Language Processing (NLP). With a simple Gmail account, the user can play any role: owning the chatbot, developing the bot, or interacting with the bot.
STEMStart Dialogflow Bootcamp included training the students in the concepts of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and applying those principles in creating a Digital Assistant (Chatbot) in addressing the requests of the user. A chatbot is a computer program that simulates human conversation through voice commands or text chats or both. Chatbot, short for chatterbot, is an artificial intelligence (AI) feature that can be embedded and used through any major messaging applications. There are a number of synonyms for chatbot, including “talkbot,” “bot,” “IM bot,” “interactive agent” , “virtual assistant”, or “artificial conversation entity.” Chatbot virtual assistants are used to handle simple, look-up tasks in both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) environments. The addition of chatbot assistants not only reduces overhead costs by making better use of support staff time, but also allows companies to provide a level of customer service during hours when live/human agents aren’t available.
After gaining the understanding of theoretical concepts, students applied these concepts in creating use cases starting with “Hello World” and further sharpened their skills in developing a digital assistant with a webhook in scenarios such as confirming the age of an individual in making an online purchase of a video game, requesting the status of the weather in a specific city of their choice, checking the availability of their favorite video game on popular websites such as Walmart, Best Buy, eBay and Amazon, and making their monthly payment of their first car. Students were excited with the hands-on experience that they gained in creating a digital assistant with real life scenarios. Several students were happy that they learned the end to end (theory and hands on experience) design and implementation of Google’s Dialogflow.