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Interacting with the Virtual Coach

Last Updated
Docebo Module
  • Learn
Reading Time
User Level
  • End Users

Introduction

The Virtual Coach in your platform is your proactive learning coach, who can guide and steer you continuously through your learning activities and your work within your learning platform.

The Virtual Coach speaks English, Italian and French although it is available for use for learners using the platform in any language. The Virtual Coach language depends on the language selected by the user in the My Profile area. If the selected language is different from English, Italian, or French, the Virtual Coach will speak in English.

At the moment, you can currently interact with it as follows:

This article gives you a quick rundown on each of these interactive experiences and how to get the most out of your conversations with your Virtual Coach, as well as how to leave feedback to your Virtual Coach so it can give you the best possible guidance.

Accessing the Virtual Coach from Your Desktop Platform

If you’re logged into your platform on a desktop device, to access your Virtual Coach, press the Virtual Coach button in the top right corner of your platform. Once you press this button, a chat panel will slide out on the right side of your platform, with your chat history on the top part of the panel, and an area to type your messages to your Virtual Coach at the bottom.

Accessing the Virtual Coach from Your Go.Learn (Mobile) App

If you’re logged into your platform on a mobile device using either the Go.Learn app or your company’s own mobile app, to access your Virtual Coach, launch your app and log into it. Then press the Virtual Coach icon in the top right corner. Then, a chat panel will slide up on your screen, with your chat history on the top part of the panel, and your area to type your messages to your Virtual Coach at the bottom.

Addressing your Virtual Coach

The Virtual Coach, as many virtual assistants do, works best if you pay some attention to how you express yourself. It is important to try to be reasonably unambiguous in how you state your intent; even if its state-of-the-art Natural Language Understanding and conversation engine can tolerate a lot of variations, highly ambiguous utterances may lead the Virtual Coach to confusion, and you might not get the answers you expect.

Here are some tips for a more effective interaction:

Speak in complete sentences

The Natural Language Understanding and conversation engine of the Virtual Coach has been trained with examples of actual human conversations and requests. Thus, the Virtual Coach grasps your intent fully by looking as much at the contextual words in what you say, as at the actual topic you are interested in.
For example,  an utterance like “give me content on cybersecurity”  can be correctly interpreted easily, and is likely to yield the desired response, whereas “cybersecurity”, or even “cybersecurity course” may lead to a lack of comprehension and poorer results,, because of the lack of actual discourse context.

Be simple and direct

Try to express your message to the Virtual Coach concisely and directly, and state it as a single request. Circuitous or overly-long sentences may lead to incorrect interpretations. You should avoid weighing down your message with too many words not relevant to the topic at hand. Also, utterances that contain multiple sentences, even if concatenated with punctuation, may lead to poor answers. 

As a general rule, the more precise and to the point your request, the more appropriate and useful the Virtual Coach response.

Notifications from Your Virtual Coach

The Virtual Coach replies to you but more importantly his task is to contact you for various reasons.

For example, if you have content that is Not Yet Started or In Progress in your learning platform, your Virtual Coach will send you push notifications from time to time to remind you about any content in a course or learning plan that you haven’t yet completed.

Other push notifications may suggest some content in your platform that the Virtual Coach thinks may interest you. In addition, once a week, the Virtual Coach will send you a digest notification listing all of the new courses and contributions available for you.

Based on your daily/weekly activities on the platform, the Virtual Coach calculates the most suitable time in your workday/week to send you notifications (and of course, the right time differs from learner to learner).

Downloading & Deleting Virtual Coach Conversations

If you want to download or delete your conversations with the Virtual Coach, please contact your platform Administrator. At the moment, you cannot do this by yourself, but in the near future, you will have the possibility to download or delete your conversations directly by your platform.

Providing Feedback

As previously mentioned, you are one of your Virtual Coach’s first friends, so it’s still refining its social skills and capabilities. At this stage, your feedback is really useful. You can give it feedback using the buttons in the conversation that are occasionally presented to you, or by typing your thoughts (in English) about whether the answers provided by your Virtual Coach were useful or not.

If your Virtual Coach provided you with content that wasn’t relevant to what you were looking for or didn’t answer your question, let it know. On the other hand, let it know when it’s doing well so it keeps coaching you the right way!

Best Practices

The Virtual Coach is still learning how to interact with humans. That means you’ll need to interact with it in specific ways in order to get the most out of it. Keep these thoughts in mind:

  • Your Virtual Coach is trained to find answers within documents, NOT to look for specific documents. So rather than asking for a specific document (i.e. Give me the latest uploaded demo), it will actually need to know what’s in the document (i.e. Give me content on cybersecurity).
  • For now, keep in mind that the Virtual Coach is fairly professional, meaning that it’s still learning how to use colloquial or slang expressions. Think of it like Miyagi from Karate Kid, and feel free to experiment in interacting with it in this type of informal language, but remember it may not always understand.

FAQs

Does my Virtual Coach share my personal data in my platform with anyone else?

No, your Virtual Coach will not share your personal learning or profile data in your platform with any other users, including your platform Administrators. Every conversation with your Virtual Coach is completely GDPR compliant.

From which devices can I access and speak with my Virtual Coach?

You can access and talk to your Virtual Coach on any device that is supported by your learning platform, both on desktop and mobile. Find more details below, and reach out to your platform Administrator if you need more details about supported systems. Supported desktop browsers: Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari. Supported mobile devices: Any mobile devices (including tablets) running on iOS 9 and higher or Android 6.0 and higher.

Can my Administrator (or anyone else) see my conversations with my Virtual Coach?

No, your conversations with your Virtual Coach are strictly personal and are shared between yourself and your Virtual Coach only. Your learning platform will never forward or share any part of your conversations with any other users in the platform, including your Admins.

Can I save or delete my conversation with the Virtual Coach?

By default, your conversation is saved directly in your chat history and is synced between all of your devices, so you can pick up where you left off either on mobile or desktop. While you cannot delete individual messages either sent by yourself or your Virtual Coach, you can delete the entire chat history. You can also save a transcript of your conversation by downloading a CSV file. To complete either one of these actions, refer to the Downloading & Deleting Virtual Coach Conversations section of this article.