With AWS AI, Nextios develops Digital Teacher for Positivo Tecnologia educational business unit

Nextios, a LWSA company, developed an AWS AI-based Digital Teacher for Education & Technology Ecosystem and Innovation, a business area of Positive Technology.The solution was presented during Bett Educar 2024, an innovation and technology event for education, held in April this year.The Digital Teacher uses an architecture based on AWS services such as Amazon Bedrock, AWS Lambda and Amazon Transcribe. 

The Digital Teacher offers quick and effective responses, improving the user experience. In addition to class summary and test preparation, the solution has the ability to generate content automatically.The goal is to make the Digital Teacher widely available to schools, improving educational management and learning experience.

Experimenting with AI as an educational tool

In addition to its portfolio of products ranging from computers, smartphones to payment machines, Positivo Tecnologia has a business area focused on developing solutions for education, such as the Educational Hub. Among the solutions present in the Hub, the platform Enhancement gained last year a generative artificial intelligence assistant 'A to Maria ' to help students understand specific questions and answer them.

According to Christiano Grillo Justus, head of Engineering and Architecture of Education, from there, in 2023, conversations began with Nextios, an AWS partner, for the use of generative AI, reaching the Digital Teacher project, a solution integrated with the Educational Hub. 

The first concept was built on the Amazon Bedrock's with content from BNCC (National Common Curricular Base) and various teaching materials. “In this stage, she learned from these materials and, by the age of the user, assumed what he should know offering information in the tone of voice of schools associated with the” system, explains Justus.

According to Carlos Alberto Marangon, technical leader and AWS ambassador at Nextios, the conversations with AWS led to the development of a new architecture model, previously unused.“The idea of using Amazon Bedrock Agents only in the final step, to bring the answers from the knowledge base, rather than developing the entire solution within the” service, he explains. 

The teams created a service-based architecture like the AWS Step Functions, AWS Lambda, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon CloudFront, Application Load Balancer, AWS Certificate Manager and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). On Amazon Bedrock, there is the use of Anthropic Claude-3, which, Knowledge Bases and AI Agents.

For Gabriel Leite da Silva, Partner Solutions Architect of AWS, the implementation strategy io isolated in specific tasks IO allowed the balance between generic information, which should not be used; and very specific, which would make the solution similar to chatbots. 

The expert emphasizes the use of a technique called prompt chain, which merges low code solutions with the code envelope that allows the final response to the user to be made through stream, which allows you to combine business flow management with very fast responses from Amazon Bedrock. 

“This combination of services is a paradigm shift.We opted for a serverless architecture and AWS tools that provide this low code part, allowing not only to deliver fast, but giving Positive Technology the opportunity to experiment with different” scenarios, he says. 

“It is not only focused on a knowledge base, being able to call a systemic API, understand its output and perform a systemic processing without the need for code to build these so-called”, he says, also emphasizing the possibility of integration with transactional and analytical workloads, with low code use. 

Meeting demands and performing tasks 

Marangon, from Nextios, reinforces that the architecture, as it was designed, allows to meet the demand and perform tasks of different levels of users, with access to specific content for teachers, students and managers. 

The use of Amazon Transcribe, for example, allows recorded classes to be saved and transformed into summaries by Amazon Bedrock that later can be consulted by students.“The recorded class becomes a content searchable by the” student, he explains, remembering that the solution, with these components, made things that were not visible and brought a performance that was not possible before. 

Justus states that the first proof of concept was developed in two months. Once the operation was verified, a second version was prepared in 15 days, allowing the Digital Teacher to be presented at Bett Educar 2024. At this stage, integration with the solutions developed by edtechs and offered in the Educational Hub was included. Thus, when consulted, the solution indicates that materials can be used within the existing solutions in the Hub.

“To introduce the Digital Teacher, we created a video of a class, showing that he can understand a video, allow students to ask questions and teachers to create a more efficient study plan based on that class, specific to certain students. In addition, the student could ask questions about the material and ask questions about the explanation, also based on the knowledge accumulated by the IA”, he explains.

Justus compares one of the functions of the Digital Teacher with that of an assistant teacher. “In the future, the director of a school who wants to know how his classes are doing, will be able to view this information and receive management suggestions.It is an assistant of actions, feedbacks, data and material.That is where we are going”, he says.

The next step, according to Justus, is to present the solution to the business team. The objective of this process is to define the path to delivering the greatest value in less time, taking the solution to schools that can actually test them. 

Andre Amorim, general director of Nextios, reinforces that “This project represents the first step of many that we are taking in the construction of solutions with Generative Artificial Intelligence.The Digital Teacher is not just a project, it is a reflection of our commitment to continue at the forefront of technology and to create solutions using the latest for our” customers, he says.