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 and Tufts internal data and systems.

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: “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. Data can broken down into the following aspects:
- Accuracy: The data for a process is accurate and up-to-date
- Volume: There’s an adequate amount of data to train, per model requirements
- Format: Data is in an adequate format for training
Hallucinations: If a model lacks adequate data on a particular topic it can potentially provide false information. Tuning of model parameters (e.g temperature) can help minimize hallucinations.
Infrastucture Costs

JumboBot

Overview

Benefits

Risks

Design