Professor Ashok Goel of Georgia Tech developed an artificially intelligent teaching assistant to help handle the enormous number of student questions in the online class, Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence. This online course is a core requirement of Georgia Tech’s online Master of Science in Computer Science program. Professor Goel already had eight teaching assistants, but that wasn’t enough to deal with the overwhelming number of daily questions from students.

    Many students drop out of online courses because of the lack of teaching support. When students feel isolated or confused and reach out with questions that go unanswered, their motivation to continue begins to fade. Professor Goel decided to do something to remedy this situation and his solution was to create a virtual assistant named Jill Watson, which is based on the IBM Watson platform.

    Goel and his team developed several versions of Jill Watson before releasing her to the online forums. At first, the virtual assistant wasn’t too great. But Goel and his team sourced the online discussion forum to find all 40,000 questions that had ever been asked since the class was launched. Then they began to feed Jill the questions and answers. After some adjustments and sufficient time, Jill was able to answer the students’ questions correctly 97% of the time. The virtual assistant became so advanced and realistic that the students didn’t know she was a computer. The students, who were studying artificial intelligence, were interacting with the virtual assistant and couldn’t tell it apart from a real human being. Goel didn’t inform them about Jill’s true identity until April 26. The students were actually very positive about the experience.

     The goal of Professor Goel’s virtual assistant next year is to take over answering 40% of all the questions posed by students on the online forum. The name Jill Watson will, of course, change to something else next semester. Professor Goel has a much rosier outlook on the future of artificial intelligence than, say, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak.

解析：C。根据professor Goel和plan to do next可定位至最后一段。该段第一句说到，对于虚拟助教，戈埃尔教授对其明年的目标是能够回答论坛所有问题的40%。由此可知，现在虚拟助教尚未负责回答这么多问题，故选C。A项利用versions设置干扰，但文中说的是吉尔•沃森在发布之前有过几个版本，并非戈埃尔教授的下一步计划，故A排除。B项利用questions和answers设置干扰，文中是说戈埃尔教授在之前就给吉尔•沃森输入了4万个问题和答案，B项属于细节拼凑，故排除。D选项在文中未提及，故排除。