Conversational artificial intelligence in institutional communication: The case of the “ORTEGA” assistant in scientific settings
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
Introduction. Conversational artificial intelligence (Yang et al., 2025) has established itself as a key technology for optimising digital interaction. Within this framework, this paper analyses the design and development of ORTEGA, a virtual assistant (Caldarini et al., 2022) integrated into the website of the 365 International AI Congress to provide automated assistance and facilitate access to information about the event. Objective. The aim is to examine the development of ORTEGA as a case study in the application of conversational systems (Trofymenko et al., 2021), describing its technical and functional integration process with a view to improving the user experience (UX) (Nielsen, 2000). Methodology. A descriptive-exploratory analysis was employed, divided into two phases: a technical implementation based on heuristic analysis (Savinic & Piazolo, 2026), and empirical validation (beta-testing) (Winteringham, 2022) with a diverse sample of 15 evaluators (experts, students and general users) using a three-dimensional usability protocol developed in the first quarter of 2026. Results. The key findings show that optimising the user interface (UI) and fixing display errors on mobile devices resulted in 100 % visibility of collaborators and a 15 % increase in interaction. The evolution of the avatar towards a pictorial aesthetic fostered an empathetic connection without causing visual rejection. Discussion. Upon examining the results, it is evident that the effectiveness of academic AI depends not only on language processing but also on its visual harmony, demonstrating that symbolic representation avoids the uncanny valley phenomenon (Seyama & Nagayama, 2007). Conclusions. It has been demonstrated that ORTEGA can serve as an initial framework for knowledge transfer. Furthermore, it has the potential to lay the groundwork for future assessments of performance and semantic accuracy for this type of tool in institutional contexts.
Downloads
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
The Journal of Communication of SEECI recognizes and promotes copyright rights, as well as the need to disseminate knowledge in an accessible and equitable manner. Our journal operates under a Creative Commons License CC BY-NC 4.0, which allows authors and users to:
- Share and Adapt: Copy, redistribute, and adapt the material published in the journal in any medium or format.
- Attribution: Properly acknowledge authorship and provide a link to the license, indicating if any changes have been made.
- Non-Commercial: Do not use the material for commercial purposes without the express permission of the authors and the journal.
- Authors retain copyright and may enter into non-exclusive agreements for self-archiving, deposit, or distribution of the publisher's version published in this journal, including institutional, national, or international repositories, and personal websites.
References
Adamopoulou, E. y Moussiades, L. (2020). An overview of chatbot technology. En Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations. AIAI 2020. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 584, 373-383. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49186-4_31 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49186-4_31
Aguilar, R. G. (2021). Más allá del Uncanny Valley. Forma de lo humano, mímesis y expresión. Bajo Palabra, 28, 176-197. https://doi.org/10.15366/bp2021.28.008 DOI: https://doi.org/10.15366/bp2021.28.008
Alfaro Ramos, A. E. y Monge Segura, F. (2024). Marketing digital para la internacionalización en las pequeñas y medianas empresas: Una revisión. RAN, 10(2), 280-294. https://doi.org/10.29393/ran10-18mdia20018 DOI: https://doi.org/10.29393/RAN10-18MDIA20018
Alpaydin, E. (2021). Machine learning (revised and updated). MIT Press.
Angrosino, M. V. (2007). Doing ethnographic and observational research. Sage Publications. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781849208932
Caldarini, G., Jaf, S. y McGarry, K. (2022). A literature survey of recent advances in chatbots. Information, 13(1), 41. https://doi.org/10.3390/info13010041 DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/info13010041
Castells, M. (2001). The internet galaxy: Reflections on the internet, business, and society. Oxford University Press.
Catamuscay Pérez, A. S., Núñez Valencia, C. E. y Ordóñez Erazo, H. A. (2025). Explorando el uso de inteligencia artificial generativa para el desarrollo de chatbots para portales web universitarios: Un mapeo sistemático. Tecnura, 29(83), 144-183. https://doi.org/10.14483/22487638.22808 DOI: https://doi.org/10.14483/22487638.22808
Cibeles. (s. f.). Cibeles.net. https://cibeles.net/
CISIA 365. (20 de marzo de 2026) Congreso Internacional sobre Inteligencia Artificial 365. https://congresoia365.net/
Cheek, C., Austin, E., Richardson, L., Testa, L., Ransolin, N., Francis-Auton, E., Safi, M., Murphy, M., De Los Santos, A., Vukasovic, M. y Clay-Williams, R. (2024). Non-participant observations in experience-based codesign: An example using a case study research approach to explore emergency department care. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 23, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069241289278 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069241289278
Creswell, J. W. y Creswell, J. D. (2018). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (5a Ed.). Sage Publications.
Crowe, S., Cresswell, K., Robertson, A., Huby, G., Avery, A. y Sheikh, A. (2011). The case study approach: A multi-faceted method to explore complex issues in real life contexts. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 11, 100. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2288-11-100 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2288-11-100
Denzin, N. K. y Lincoln, Y. S. (2018). The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (5ª Ed.). Sage Publications.
Dourish, P. (2001). Where the action is: The foundations of embodied interaction. MIT Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/7221.001.0001
Ertz, M., Maravilla, J. M. B. y Cao, X. (2025). Prosumer: A new approach to conceptualisation. Journal of Innovation & Knowledge, 10(1), 100653. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jik.2025.100653 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jik.2025.100653
Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language. Longman.
Fairclough, N. (2013). Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language (2ª Ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315834368 DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315834368
Gadamer, H.-G., Weinsheimer, J. y Marshall, D. G. (Eds.). (2004). Truth and method (2nd revised). Continuum.
Gómez Cano, C. A. (2025). Sociedad del conocimiento y digitalización de procesos en educación. #ashtag, 1(26), 52-67. https://doi.org/10.52143/2346139X.1096
Góngora, G. y Lavilla, D. (2020). La importancia de la construcción de marca en Instagram para las empresas periodísticas. En E. J. F. Benítez (Ed.), Estudios multidisciplinarios en comunicación audiovisual, interactividad y marca en la red (pp. 129-138). Egregius Ediciones. https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7346301
Goodfellow, I., Bengio, Y. y Courville, A. (2016). Deep learning. MIT Press.
Haugeland, J. (2001). La inteligencia artificial. Siglo XXI de España Editores, S.A.
Higgins, J. P. T., Thomas, J., Chandler, J., Cumpston, M., Li, T., Page, M. J. y Welch, V.A. (Eds.). (2022). Cochrane handbook for systematic reviews of interventions (3ª Ed.). Wiley.
Howard, J. y Ruder, S. (2018). Universal language model fine-tuning for text classification. En Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. (pp. 328-339). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P18-1031 DOI: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P18-1031
Huertas-Abril, C. A. (2025). Aprendizaje automático. En L. McCallum y D. Tafazoli (Eds.), La enciclopedia Palgrave del aprendizaje de idiomas asistido por computadora. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51447-0_104-1 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51447-0_104-1
Jurafsky, D. y Martin, J. H. (2023). Speech and language processing: An introduction to natural language processing, computational linguistics, and speech recognition (3ª Ed.). Stanford University. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200111340_Speech_and_Language_Processing_An_Introduction_to_Natural_Language_Processing_Computational_Linguistics_and_Speech_Recognition
Karras, T., Aila, T., Laine, S., Herva, A. y Lehtinen, J. (2017). Audio-driven facial animation by joint end-to-end learning of pose and emotion. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 36, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3072959.3073658 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3072959.3073658
Kranzberg, M. (1986). Technology and history: “Kranzberg”s laws”. Technology and Culture, 27(3), 544-560. https://doi.org/10.2307/3105385 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0008
Lavilla Muñoz, D. (2025). Sociedad grabada: La comunicación y el riesgo tecnológico. Peter Lang. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3726/b21928
LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y. y Hinton, G. (2015). Deep learning. Nature, 521(7553), 436-444. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539
Leonhard, G. [@GerdFuturista](2026). Gerd Leonhard, orador, futurista y humanista. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaW9gbtfODjWZ3S3urw4OzA
Lewis, P., Perez, E., Piktus, A., Petroni, F., Karpukhin, V., Goyal, N., Küttler, H., Lewis, M., Yih, W.-t., Rocktäschel, T., Riedel, S. y Kiela, D. (2020). Retrieval-augmented generation for knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 33, 9459-9474. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2020/hash/6b493230205f780e1bc26945df7481e5-Abstract.html
Mateos-Abarca, J. P. y Sedano Rodríguez, J. (2025). Análisis comparativo del empleo redaccional de la inteligencia artificial generativa en la formación periodística: Un estudio de caso. VISUAL Review, 17(4). https://doi.org/10.62161/revvisual.v17.5984 DOI: https://doi.org/10.62161/revvisual.v17.5984
Mienye, I. D., Jere, N., Obaido, G., Ogunruku, O. O., Esenogho, E. y Modisane, C. (2025). Large language models: An overview of foundational architectures, recent trends, and a new taxonomy. Discover Applied Sciences, 7, 1027. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42452-025-07668-w DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42452-025-07668-w
Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M. y Saldaña, J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook (3ª Ed.). Sage Publications.
Mori, M. (1970). Bukimi no tani [the uncanny valley]. Energy, 7, 33-35.
Mori, M., MacDorman, K. F. y Kageki, N. (2012). The Uncanny Valley [From the Field]. IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, 19(2), 98-100. https://doi.org/10.1109/MRA.2012.2192811 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/MRA.2012.2192811
Murphy, K. P. (2012). Machine learning: A probabilistic perspective. MIT Press.
Nielsen, J. (2000). Designing web usability: The practice of simplicity. New Riders Publishing.
Nieto, A. y Iglesias, F. (2000). La empresa informativa (2.ª ed. act.). Ariel.
Núñez Fernández, V., Peinado Miguel, F. y Pérez Serrano, M. (2022). La empresa informativa en la era digital. Udima.
Postman, N. (1998). Five things we need to know about technological change. The New York Times.
Ricoeur, P. (1981). Hermeneutics and the human sciences: Essays on language, action and interpretation. Cambridge University Press.
Rodríguez Canfranc, P. R. y Guallarte Nuez, C. G. (2025). El chatbot: La inteligencia artificial como la voz de la empresa. En UAB - Llibres en obert. UAB - Llibres en obert. https://doi.org/10.5565/lib/9788410202412 DOI: https://doi.org/10.5565/lib/9788410202412
Savinic, S. y Piazolo, F. (2026). Heuristics Based User Experience Evaluation for Identifying Usability Issues. ACM Digital Library / Proceedings of Human-Computer Interaction, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3765766.3765824 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3765766.3765824
Segovia-García, N. (2024). Optimización de la atención estudiantil: Una revisión del uso de chatbots de IA en la educación superior. European Public & Social Innovation Review, 9, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.31637/epsir-2024-324 DOI: https://doi.org/10.31637/epsir-2024-369
Seyama, J. I. y Nagayama, R. S. (2007). The uncanny valley: Effect of realism on the impression of artificial human faces. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 16(4), 337-351. https://doi.org/10.1162/pres.16.4.337 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/pres.16.4.337
Sierra-Sánchez, J. y Mateos-Abarca, J. P. (2024). Evaluación de «chatbots» en la generación de información médica cualificada: Un estudio comparativo entre instituciones sanitarias. En Nuevos escenarios y perspectivas en comunicación y salud (pp. 65-80).
Taufique, K. M. R., Sabbir, M. M. y Rabbanee, F. K. (2026). A guide to key decision criteria for Likert-scale use in survey research. Global Business and Organizational Excellence, 45(5), 493-508. https://doi.org/10.1002/joe.70032 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/joe.70032
Teixes, F. (2015). Gamificación: Fundamentos y aplicaciones. Editorial UOC.
Toffler, A. (1980). La tercera ola. Plaza y Janés.
Trofymenko, O., Prokop, Y., Loginova, N. y Zadereyko, A. (2021). Clasificación de chatbots. En Sistemas intelectuales, información y tecnologías: Actas de la conferencia internacional científico y práctica. Universidad Estatal del Medio Ambiente de Odesa.
Turing, A. M. (1936). On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, s2-42(1), 230-265. https://doi.org/10.1112/plms/s2-42.1.230 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1112/plms/s2-42.1.230
Van Dijk, T. A. (2015). Critical discourse analysis. En D. Tannen, H. E. Hamilton y D. Schiffrin (Eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 466-485). Wiley Blackwell. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118584194.ch22
Van Dijk, T. A. (2017). Discurso y contexto: Un enfoque sociocognitivo. Gedisa.
Vikas, A., Sethi, D. y Paul, J. (2019). Does digital footprint act as a digital asset?–Enhancing brand experience through remarketing. International Journal of Information Management, 49, 142-156. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2019.03.013
Virilio, P. (1997). La política de lo peor. Cátedra.
Winograd, T. y Flores, F. (1986). Understanding computers and cognition: A new foundation for design. Ablex Publishing.
Winteringham, M. (2022). Testing web APIs. Manning Publications.
Yang, F., Acevedo, P. D., Guo, S., Choi, M. y Mousas, C. (2025). Embodied conversational agents in extended reality: A systematic review. IEEE Access,13, pp. 79805-79824. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3566698 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3566698
Yee, N. y Bailenson, J. (2007). The Proteus effect: The effect of transformed self-representation on behavior. Human Communication Research, 33(3), 271-290. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.2007.00299.x DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.2007.00299.x
Yin, R. K. (2018). Case Study Research and Applications: Design and Methods. Sage Publications.
Zaragosa, A. R. A. (2025). Semantic search and generative AI for PubMed: A RAG approach with ChromaDB and Gemini. International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology, 73(10), 161-173. https://doi.org/10.14445/22315381/IJETT-V73I10P113 DOI: https://doi.org/10.14445/22315381/IJETT-V73I10P113
Zhou, Z.-H. (2021). Machine learning. Springer. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1967-3