Inspiration
Any Georgia Tech student knows how overwhelming it can be to find answers to their questions through the university's websites. There is so much information and so many different places to get that information that it can be very difficult to know where to start. We decided to tackle this problem in an interactive way by creating a chatbot.
What it does
GT Buzzbot is a chatbot that appears on any "gatech" website for the user to ask it questions they have about Georgia Tech. The bot then provides an answer or acts as quick navigation to a page with answers.
How we built it
We used Microsoft Azure's QnA maker and Web App Bot to create the chatbot. We also created a mock GT website to show where the chatbot would be located on a page. The site was made using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
Challenges we ran into
Training the chatbot took a lot of time because we had to come up with relevant questions and variations of those questions to improve the bot's correctness. Originally, we wanted to pull from Georgia Tech's already existing mass of FAQs, but we found that some answers were too long, or they were in incompatible formats. Some issues we ran into while making the mock GT website was with the formatting of the elements on the page. It was difficult to have the chatbox in front of the page's text and pictures instead of in-line with everything.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of our chatbot and our implementation of it on the site. There were moments while training the chatbot that were very entertaining and other moments that were surprising like when the chatbot replied with something that it learned.
What we learned
We learned how to create a chatbot using Microsoft Azure. We realized that a lot goes into training a bot because how a question is worded has a pretty big effect on the answer. We also figured out how to put it on a web app to have it appear on launch.
What's next for GT Buzzbot
We would like to train the Buzzbot even further so that it can handle question variations better and give more accurate answers. Additionally, GT Buzzbot could be turned into a template for chatbots for other universities, schools, or companies to make it easier for their users to navigate through lots of data and websites.
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