AlmaBot

AlmaBot herself!

Inspiration

Our project "AlmaBot" was inspired primarily by the prompt, calling back to Microsoft's original Clippy assistant. We wanted a helpful tool just like Microsoft's but catered to Illinois students. We were also inspired by Professor Wade's dataset of the GPAs of every course at UIUC, and the website that allows students to see how many people received what grade in general education courses. We wanted to take this idea further and create a generative AI that can listen to users' needs concerning the wide range of classes at the University of Illinois, and answer them personally.

What it does

AlmaBot is an AI chatbot that allows users to ask any questions concerning their schedules or classes they are planning to take at UIUC. Then, based on the answers AlmaBot gives, students are better assisted in planning their future schedules.

How we built it

We built AlmaBot using Python, Gradio, and Langchain.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into challenges when trying to connect our frontend and backend code. Although developing both the front end and back end separately was simple, connecting the two proved to be a challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to create something that is benefitting the users by giving them advice on how to choose their classes. The AI chatbot works to give data about gpa, professors, and classes. By incorporating all of these factors, we were able to create a chatbot that helps college students at UIUC (like us!) select their classes. We are also proud of all the new skills we learned in just a few hours.

What we learned

Before we started, we barely knew what an OpenAI API key was, how langchain worked, and how to display a program on a webpage. All these skills were gained by all of us in this one hackathon!

What's next for AlmaBot

We hope to make AlmaBot more advanced by feeding it a wider variety of data and keeping it up to date for future students so it is not useless in 2 years time as more courses become available.