Inspiration
It's hard navigating for specific things in the UC Merced website, there are hundreds of links, acronyms, and offices on campus that cover different things. We wanted to make things easy for struggling students who need financial help, or want to know where to find some. After looking at Letta AI and their chatbot feature in the workshop, we knew this was the direction we wanted to take.
What it does
The user asks for anything related to finances and/or resources for UC Merced students. Our AI chatbot is provided with documents and information which guides it in the right direction and sends the users relevant links. For example, if the user asks for how to meet with their advisor, the bot will search for their advisor in a document we provided with all the bobcat advisors and their links. After it finds the advisor, it let's the user know who they are and sends a link for scheduling an appointment with them. Our bot is given information about the offices at UC Merced for finance, ways to file taxes for free, UCM jobs, scholarships, and other bits of information.
How we built it
The chatbot with all the info we provided it with was all done in the Letta platform. The user interface was coded by Jonathan trying to create a login system that updated a .json file to hold user login data.
Challenges we ran into
Lots of errors due to not understanding how to work with .json files that were resolved by asking an instructor. Lots of unneeded complications like trying to save user inputs and display them, but this was scrapped due to not knowing how to perform this procedure.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We got it to work and it displays past messages from the chat from the AI system, but doesn't show from before you login to a new session. We are also proud of our bot having specific knowledge of UC Merced facilities and links that regular ChatGPT could not retrieve.
What we learned
We learned how to set up Letta for the first time, and made an AI chatbot. We also gained knowledge on java script development and creating a front end that can communicate with Letta.
What's next for Financial Literacy Chatbot for UC Merced Students
More features! We wanted to make it so the Bot can make Google Calendar events for the user if they wish to make an appointment with their advisor or office of financial aid. We couldn't get this done in time, so if we had more time we would definitely add more features like that. Spicing up the AI and making it more user friendly is also a top priority, as well as absolutely making it so the user's responses get saved
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.