Overview

As we seek to improve and streamline user experiences across departments of the University, chatbots have been proposed by various departments as a means to accomplish this goal. While there are many different chatbot offerings in the market today, TTS seeks to create a single, unified chatbot in-house to serve all departments, leveraging Generative AI.

Benefits

• Unified experience: Users only have to engage with one chatbot, regardless of the department they seek to engage with.

• Centralized Design/Development: The chatbot will follow a singular design pattern and set of best practices.

• Fine-tuned for Tufts: Models can be fine tuned to Tufts data and provide a more reliable/accurate experience.

• Cost Savings: Chat bots in general can yield savings by making certains roles or systems obsolete. Additionally, in-house development can yield cost savings over off-the-shelf chatbots and models.

• Time savings: Staff can spend less time on mundane, repetitive tasks, and spend more time on meaningful, interesting projects.

Risks

• Data Quality: “Garbage in, garbage out” The training of any model hinges on accurate, high quality data in an optimal format. If a department lacks this, it can hinder development and even worse, lead to unreliable model output.

Design

The chatbot will be designed around a modular architecture, with each department being assigned it’s own model trained and fine-tuned on it’s specific data. This will allow for modular development and training of models, minimizing the impact to models of other departments.

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