"Glowie" is a chatbot service on EDB Homepage, which answers some common questions on recruitment of Assistant Primary School Master/Mistress and Assistant Education Officer, or helps finding the EDB forms listed in Form Search.  The service supports English, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.  The chatbot will try to understand your needs base on your text input, and suggests answer with relevant URLs provided in a dialogue manner.  You may find the chatbot icon in the following webpages:

• Home
• Form Search

To begin, you may simply click / tap the chatbot icon on the bottom right hand corner, and type the question or choose from the popular items.

The chatbot operates on natural languages processing and machine learning technologies.  Given the great variety of enquiries and limitations of machine learning, the response may not be always perfect.  We will strive to improve the accuracy of chatbot by learning the suitable answers to various questions through conversations with users.  Besides, the chatbot requires JavaScript to run on.  If JavaScript support is turned off in your browser, the chatbot does not work as well.

The interaction with chatbot

The chatbot supports textual interaction with users.  You can use the voice-to-text function of smartphones and tablets to communicate with the chatbot.

Languages supported

The chatbot supports Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and English.  Users can choose different languages with the language menu at the top right hand corner of the dialogue pane.  Traditional Chinese dialogue can also support mixed languages input (Traditional Chinese and English in the same input).

The content covered

In addition to answering some common questions on recruitment of Assistant Primary School Master/Mistress and Assistant Education Officer, EDB forms listed in Form Search can also be found in the chatbot.  Since it takes time to train and improve the accuracy of the chatbot, any newly added, amended or removed EDB forms may not be reflected in the chatbot immediately.  However, such forms will be reflected as soon as possible.

Personal information

The chatbot will not request users to provide any personal identifiable information.  To secure the protection of privacy with respect to personal data, you should not provide any personal identifiable information when using the function.

Back up the information provided by the chatbot

If you are using Chrome, Firefox or Safari, you can click the Print button in the bottom right hand corner of the dialogue pane and select a printer to print a copy.  You can also save the information as a PDF file using the feature provided by your browser.  If you are using other browsers, you can copy the relevant text to another file for saving.

Provide comments

You can give your comments on the chatbot service through General Enquiry on EDB Homepage. Your comments are appreciated and we will use them to continue improving the chatbot service.

Search procedure

The chatbot will help you narrow down your search for school information.

There are two easy ways to start a search:

• Click the search button (Find primary school information) at the bottom of the dialogue
  
  

• Type "Find primary school information"

During the search, the chatbot may ask the following six questions in order to refine the scope of the search:

• Choose a district
• Choose the student gender of the school
• Choose the finance type
• Choose the medium of instruction
• Choose the religion of the school
• Whether the school includes either through train, feeder or nominated Secondary School

Once the search has started, you can always cancel it by selecting 'Cancel the search' at the bottom of the chatbot's response dialogue.

Advanced approach: Search keyword and sample

In addition to clicking the search button (Find primary school information), the chatbot also understands the simple input message to start the search (Advanced approach). The chatbot service has provided many different topics related to EDB, and most of them are very similar. To improve the accuracy of understanding your request, you can use the following keywords or patterns in the dialogue to speed up the search process:

A simple way to find primary schools

• Find primary school information
• Find primary school
• Search primary school

Advanced approach: Questions searched in a mixed pattern. For example

• District + School Gender: Boys school in Sham Shui Po District, Co-ed school in Southern District
• District + medium of instruction: English teaching primary school in Kowloon City District
• District + finance type: Aided primary school in Kowloon City District, Gov't primary school in Wan Chai District
• District + religion of the school: Catholicism primary school in Central & Western District

If you use the advanced approach to ask a question and there are too many schools in the results to display effectively, the system will continue to refine the scope of the search using the questions listed in the 'Search procedure'.

Since providing an exact keyword to questions in the "Search procedure" gives you the best search quality in the advanced approach, we have prepared some data source keywords as a reference:

• Student gender: Boys, Girls, Co-ed
• Finance type: Gov't, Aided, Private, DSS
• Medium of instruction: Chinese, English, Chinese & English, Chinese(incl.: Putonghua), Chinese(incl.: Putonghua) and English
• Religion of the school: Not applicable, Catholicism, Protestantism / Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Confucianism, Others

In addition to the search process, you can simply enter the full official name of the school to search and view the school information. For example:

• Hennessy Road Government Primary School
• Ma Tau Chung Government Primary School

Meanwhile, the chatbot only supports the full official name of the school. The system may not be able to search for other aliases of the school you provide.

Data source