 From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Imagine, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown Seattle at the AWS Imagine Education Conference. It's the second year of the conference. It's really successful so much now. They have another education conference, or excuse me, imagine conference coming up for nonprofits, but this is the education one. About 800 people, and we're excited to have, I think they had representatives from like 40 countries here. It's amazing such a small conference with such great global representation. And we've got our first guest all the way from Valencia, Spain. He is Inaki Bilbao Estrada, and device chancellor for internationalization and innovation at the CEU Universidad Cardinal Herrera. It's a mouthful. Welcome. Thank you very much. So first off, impressions from the show, from the keynotes this morning. It was very impressive, the keynote by the Andrew Goh and Teresa Carson, by Amazon. We were impressed. We were included in the keynote, and we are very proud of having been included in the keynote for our Alexa skill. Right. So before we get into kind of what they talked about, let's back up a few steps in terms of what you were trying to accomplish as an institution. So it gives a little bit of background on the college, how big it was and kind of what was going on and what you wanted to really do differently. We are an Spanish university. We belong with the San Pablo Foundation. We chose three universities in Spain, Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia. We are a not-for-profit universities. And in Valencia, in our case, we are very proud that we used to be a local university with only 300 international students eight years ago. And right now we have reached 2,500 international students which represents around 30, 33% of the population of the university. We are right now 8,000 undergraduate students and 3,000 graduate students. So that's pretty amazing. So as you said, you were really kind of a regional university and you decided you wanted more international students. Why did you want more international students? And then once you made that goal, what were some of the major objectives at the beginning of this process or problems that you had to overcome? It was a trend in higher education institutions, but for us it was very important for two reasons. One, the sustainability of the university, but also, and I think the main reason is that we want to have our students to have a global experience. So we want to become a global university based in Valencia, but we have right now more than 80 countries represented on campus. Wow, so what were some of the big hurdles that you saw that were going to get in the way of attracting more of these international students? So it was very important for us to adapt all our processes to our students. And for this we have a very helpful partner on campus, it was the IT department with Jose Lee Roche in charge of this department. And through technology, we have been able to escalate and get the automation of all this process in order to reach a bigger number of international students. So we have adapted all the processes to the need of our international students, our new population of international students. So you were highlighted today for a very specific thing for a very specific device, which is Alexa and voice as an interface. And we saw some of the Alexa stuff last year in terms of the kids asking it when is my test, is my homework, do these types of things. But you guys are actually taking it to the next level. And explain to the folks what you guys have done with Alexa. So we have used Alexa to introduce a virtual assistant for all our students, national, international students, and one of the main things that have been highlighted in the keynote is that it's not only in English but also in Spanish. So like this we are covering the two most big language on campus, English and Spanish. So you've got bilingual Alexa's in the room. Yeah, so for us it was very important, as explained before, that technology is helping us to cover all the population of students, not only part of them. Right, and using English is kind of universal language regardless of what their native tongue is. So did you have to build all this from scratch? How much was Amazon helping you to do the English to Spanish translation? Was it written in Spanish? How did some of those logistics work out? So we began six months ago with the project with the help of Amazon. They were very, very, very helpful for us with Anna Kavev and Juan Manuel Gomez from the UK team of Amazon. And they guide us how to develop the Alexa skill for the goals that we set with them, what we want to achieve with the virtual assistant for our students. And yeah, so the skills are the things that you actually write. So how many different skills did you write, especially for your students? So what we are doing is to build only one, but we are integrating all the intents in one only slide. So we are integrating intents related with what's next, as I mean on Blackboard, which are my grades. How can I book a room in the library or in other spaces of the university, locations of the different service or professors of the university? We are integrating a lot of service, but in one skill because we don't want the students to have to switch between skills. So we're aiming to have one virtual assistant for the students in only one skill. So that's interesting. I didn't even think about all the integration points that you have, but you've got integration points and all these other systems, the room booking services, the library services, Blackboard and the other educational services. So how many points of integration are there? There are a lot. We are working right now. We are focused on around five, seven integration points because also we are integrating it with our CVM in order to have personalized message to different segments of our students, depending on if they are due to get some documentation to the registrar office. So we think that the integration with CVM allows us to give personalized message and notification to our students depending on the situation. So it's not a general notification for all the students on campus. That's awesome. And again, highlighted in the keynote really, I think it's the first kind of bilingual implementation of Alexa. So that's terrific. I want to shift gears a little bit about innovation and transformation. We go to a lot of tech shows. We talk to a lot of big companies. Everybody wants to digitally transform and innovate. Traditionally, education hasn't been known as the most progressive industry in terms of transforming. You said right off the bat that's your job is about transformation and innovation. Where's that coming from? Is that from the competitive world and what you live? Is that a top-down leadership directive? What's kind of pushing basically the investment in this innovation around your guy's school? So I believe that education can be disrupt in the next five, 10 years. So what we think at the university is that we have to be closer to this disruption. And in this sense, we are working a lot to improve the student experience of our students on campus. Because if not, we think that it makes no sense to study on campus and you can go online. So that's why we're using technology to improve the student's experience on campus. So we are trying to avoid those things that have no value added for the students through technology and through this digital transformation. In order that we have more time for this value added interaction between the staff, academic and non-academic staff with the students. Right, right. And then how has the reception been with the staff, both the academic staff and the non-academic staff? Because clearly the students are your customers, your primary customer, but they're a customer as well. So how have they embraced this and got behind it? So as in all the institutions, you have a part of the institution that is not so in favor about these innovations. But the big number of professors and staff, I have seen the benefits of not to have to answer email Saturday night because the virtual assistant is 24 hours, seven days a week. So they've seen the benefits of how technology can give them more time for this value added interaction with the students. And for this, in order to avoid only top down decisions, we have created digital ambassador programs with this program, what we do is to share with our professors and with our non-academic staff what we are planning and how they see the project. Right, right. And we are integrating their opinions and their suggestions in the program. So you're six months into it, you said, since you launched it? Yeah. Okay, I'm just curious if you can share any stories, biggest surprises, things that you just didn't expect. I always like law of unintended consequences as you go through this process. So one of the thing is, so in Spain, Alexa was launching in November, in last November, so it's very new in Spain. There's no voice assistant in the last nine months. It has exploded, but we didn't have before. So the students have been very impressed that the university were working at this level with the technology so new because it was even new for them, even if they are younger and they knew a lot about this technology, but they were impressed that the university so quick react to the introduction of the technology. And the other point is through innovation, we are also using Alexa for the digital transformation of learning and teaching. And we have launched an innovation program for quizzes for the students and we have a huge amount of volunteers that they want to see how it works. Right, right. I'm just curious too to get your take on voice as an interface. You made an interesting comment before we turned the cameras on that, email just doesn't work very well for today's kids. They don't use it, they're not used to using it. But voice still seems to really be lagging. I get an email from Google every couple of days saying, here ask your Google assistant this or actually Alexa this, we still haven't learned it. But from where you're sitting and seeing kind of this new way to interact and as you said, get away from these emails in the middle of the night that asks, when's my paper due when I could ask the assistant. How do you see that evolving? Are you excited about it? Do you see voice as really the centerpiece as a lot of these new innovations or is it just one of many things that you're working on? So I think the difference is that usually higher education institutions we have abuse of email for communication with students with so massive amount of emails. I think what they feel with the voice assistants is that they have the freedom to choose what they want to know or not. So if they can ask voice virtual assistant as in with case, they have the freedom when they want the information. So I think it's a big difference between emails. So in email you decide when you send the information to the students. With voice technology is the student that is the student who is asking when they want the information. So I think it's an important shift for them. Yeah, just huge because they never ask for the email. No, and after they tell us that it was an important information that they didn't check the email. So they complain that they don't have the right information. Well, Anaki, thank you for sharing your story and congratulations on this project. Sounds like you're just getting started. You got a long ways to go. Thank you so much. All right, thank you. He's Anaki, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in downtown Seattle at AWS Imagine Education Conference. Thanks for watching. See you next time.