ACCESSIBILITY, BIASES AND ETHICS IN CHATBOTS AND INTELLIGENT AGENTS FOR EDUCATION Emmanuelle Gutiérrez y Restrepo 1,2 , Martín Baldassarre 2 , Jesús G. Boticario 1 1 aDeNu Research Group. Artificial Intelligence Department.Computer Science School, UNED (SPAIN) 2 Fundación Sidar – Acceso Universal (SPAIN) Abstract The use of chatbots is increasingly common in universities around the world to support both educational and administrative tasks. There is also a growing awareness of the importance of inclusive education and, as a consequence, the need to comply with accessibility requirements regarding web contents and web interface (WCAG). These requirements are also supported by specific laws in most countries. But such awareness does not yet reach the interfaces of conversational agents or chatbots that are being developed. Within the framework of the European project ACACIA, co-funded by the Erasmus+ program of the European Union, Artemisa, a chatbot has been created dedicated to fight against sexual harassment and search for volunteers to promote the acceptance of diversity and tolerance, has been created using a platform that facilitates the generation and management of this type of artificial intelligences. But to what extent Artemisa is an accessible chatbot or not? Is it ethically acceptable to make use of a tool that is intended to support inclusiveness but presents accessibility barriers to some users? What is the current state in terms of accessibility compliance of chatbots that work on social networks? This article seeks to answer this and other questions related to accessibility in Chatbots, conversational agents and virtual assistant’s. Based on the answer to these questions it follows that there is a need for training in interculturalism and web accessibility to combat the biases that present such entities, which are endowed with artificial intelligence and, unfortunately, in some cases causing serious damage to some people. Keywords: Conversational agents, Chatbot, accessibility, biases, ethics, empathy, artificial intelligence. 1 INTRODUCTION Joseph Weizenbaum [1] of MIT in 1966 developed a program that was intended to be able to deceive humans by making them think that they were talking to another person, who was pretended to be a psychotherapist from the humanist or Rogerian school. This “entity” was called ELIZA and is considered the first conversational agent or chatbot, even though it was created long before the term 'ChatterBot' was coined three decades later to define conversational programs. Until 2001, when it was considered that the first chatbot was actually created, several entities were developed such as ALICE [2], Albert One [3] that won the Loebner Prize Contest both in 1998 and in 1999 or Mitsuki [4] that continues to operate today and that He has won that prize four times. These chatbots were limited to holding conversations with more or less success since they only had basic functions. With the arrival of SmarterChild [5] everything changed. It was no longer a mere conversational bot, but almost a first virtual assistant sketch that became compatible with AIM, MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ, and went from being a simple entertainment to becoming a method to offer different services. It was a bot ahead of its time, a kind of father for the current Siri, Cortana or Google Now. Chatbots, conversational agents or virtual assistants, are being used for some time by numerous universities to facilitate students to perform various procedures, such as obtaining information about a course, supporting enrolment or virtually moving through the campus, but also in more academic tasks, such as obtaining information on the degree of students’ satisfaction in a given course and even carrying out evaluations of a subject or module. Today there are already several companies dedicated to creating chatbots for universities, which deal with informative or management tasks, and these have shown positive results. But the use of these intelligent agents as teachers is scarcer though it is much appreciated by students. These have not yet Proceedings of EDULEARN19 Conference 1st-3rd July 2019, Palma, Mallorca, Spain ISBN: 978-84-09-12031-4 8824