New AI chatbot helps FSB students get quick answers to advising questions
Helping students get answers to often-asked questions is one of the goals.
New AI chatbot helps FSB students get quick answers to advising questions
A new AI chatbot is now available for Farmer School of Business students who have questions about classes, schedules, and other aspects of student life that are handled by the FSB Advising Office.
Cory Duchesneau, assistant director of Academic Advising, said the idea for the bot started last spring. “We get inundated with lots of emails that are very easily answerable, like ‘When do I register for classes?’ Or sometimes we'll have a student make a 30-minute appointment, and when they come in, they have a very quick question,” he said. “Even though the answers are on our website, it seemed like there were chatbots all kinds of places, so it might streamline a lot of that work.”
Duchesneau worked with Information Systems and Analytics professor Fadel Megahed, who previously built a chatbot called ChatISA to assist students with programming code questions. He’s since expanded the chatbot to be help coach teams through projects, generate practice exams, and prepare students for interview questions.
“I actually enjoyed working on it, but the majority of the work, Fadel built at all -- I don't know anything about AI -- and then David Jones in FSB information technology built the whole website for it, and we worked until the chatbot was doing what we needed it to do,” Duchesneau said.
Once it gets a question, the AI works for several seconds before giving the question a response, along with a link to where to get more information.
“It's done a pretty good job in testing, honestly, but we designed it to be fairly conservative. I'd rather it only give an exact answer from the website and then otherwise refer someone to the advising office as opposed to giving the closest answer,” Duchesneau said.
“We’ll have a log of all the questions, so we can see what students are asking, and if we see they’re asking certain questions over and over, we can add that to the curriculum of the Business 106 class that everyone takes,” he said.
