We're so excited about a few new features we're working on that we wanted to share a little bit about them while they're still in development.
Harnessing the power of IBM's AI
Our first upcoming feature is AI-powered language processing. That's right, artificial intelligence.
Thanks to the wonders of the AlchemyLanguage APIs from IBM's Watson Developer Cloud, Switchboard will be much smarter about what users are interested in.
We'll use AlchemyLanguage to process posts on Switchboard and figure out what those posts are about. Then we'll know that a post is about law school even if the words "law school" aren't included in the body of the post. Or that a post is about medicine even when only the words "med school" are in the body of the post.
This will enable us to send super relevant and timely notifications to users who have indicated an interest in those subjects. Ever had a friend send you a job opening because they thought you might want to apply? Now Switchboard will have that level of human intelligence. Switchboard users will be better informed about and connected to opportunities in their network than ever.
Enlisting the help of the designers of Slack
If you don't already use Slack to communicate with your team, you certainly at least know about it. But did you know that the company Slack wasn't responsible for the initial design of the app? Metalab was.
Metalab is an interface design company that's worked with Apple, Google, TED, and so on. We're partnering with them to improve Switchboard's analytics dashboard. The new interface will help our partner schools more deeply understand the health of their Switchboard communities and share that success with their colleagues.
We'll also revamp our new user directory while we're at it to enable administrators to create and save demographic user segments and then analyze those segments in the updated analytics dashboard.
In short? Switchboard will be smarter than ever. 🎉