Enrollment Services’ new AI chatbot assists students with webpage wayfinding

UAA Enrollment Services Center is partnering with IvyQuantum – an AI chatbot service – to create an AI chatbot that will assist students in navigating all of UAA’s web pages.

The personalized UAA chat bot is named Spirit, after the university’s mascot, and is represented by an avatar of Spirit that welcomes everyone to the Seawolf Nation.

Possibly the biggest reason to implement a chat AI is the fact that“last year, for the academic year ‘23, we had 25,868 phone calls. That's only during open hours,” said UAA Student Experience Coordinator Eileen Moring.

Spirit will be able to reduce these numbers and assist students in a more timely and convenient manner.

Moring is the project manager who oversaw the addition of AI into the Enrollment Services’ webpages. She has been working with the chat AI team for the last two months helping to produce concise responses from Spirit.

Navigating UAA’s webpages can feel overwhelming at times, but Spirit can direct students to specific pages where answers to their questions can be more easily found.

“All of the information is on the website but sometimes students, staff, faculty and community members sometimes can get overwhelmed with all of the different options. So I see this as a helpful tool in the navigation of our website,” said Moring.

Clicking the chat box to speak with Spirit will produce “hot buttons.” These buttons are questions that Enrollment Services sees most often from students and are links to further the conversation with Spirit.

If your question is not in the hot buttons list, you can simply type it instead.

When chatting with Spirit, students will be able to give feedback about the conversation with a thumbs up or a thumbs down. If given a thumbs down, Spirit will ask the student to ask the question again or submit a ticket.

“The tickets will go to our different offices so that a staff member can reach out to them and work through it in person. We know that there’s limitations with chat AI, especially because there are so many ways to ask the same question. We still want students to feel supported,” said Moring.

The ticket also gets sent to the individual department where a student’s question originated. “We have different bots for different areas. So when you look at the chatbot for Admissions, it’ll go to the individual department. If for some reason a student is asking a Military Veteran Student Services question to the [Admissions] chatbot, Admissions will be able to give that to Military Veteran Student Services,” said Moring.

Initiating conversation with Spirit will go to Moring’s admin portal, where she can view individual conversations Spirit had. She is then able to edit Spirit’s responses so future conversations are more accurate.

“The next time that question is asked, it gives either a more concise answer or, if it’s ambiguous, we start teaching the bot how to sort through all of the ways people ask things. It learns,” said Moring.

The chatbot will be released sometime late September to ensure the AI provides quality responses.