Sammy Support Crew

Inspiration

College life is very hard to navigate, especially coming straight out of high school. On top of that, with a website as broad as UCSC’s, it can be difficult to find the exact solution to your problem. As freshmen at UCSC, we often got overwhelmed navigating the vast amount of resources ourselves, and sometimes even the offices don’t know how to redirect you. That’s what the Sammy Support Crew was made for. To help you sift through the massive amount of resources offered to you by UCSC, narrow them down to a few, and guide you to the right person or office to talk to.”

What it does

Sammy Support Crew is an AI tool that analyzes the many campus resources inputted in the database according to what the user requests, analyzes the resources, and gives back the links, offices, and other information that will answer the request. The five AI bots (Sammy, Sunny, Delbert, Henry, and Beatrice) take the user's information and suggest quick actions based on their analysis of the information. There are five bots that the user can speak to, and the user can choose who they want to talk to by clicking on the mascot. The five are: Sammy the Slug Secretary, Sunny the Social Squirrel, Delbert the Diligent Deer, Henry the Healthy Hammerhead, Beatrice the Bus-driving Barracuda. Each has their own field of knowledge except Sammy, who answers general questions or redirects the user to the right bot if they do not know who to talk to. Sunny the Social Squirrel handles the student life and engagement resources, as well as the financial aid and college directory. Delbert the Diligent Deer handles all the academic resources. Henry the Healthy Hammerhead handles all the health resources, as well as the discrimination and crisis offices. Beatrice the Bus-driving Barracuda handles all the information about transportation and transit services, as well as parking permits. Together, they aim to guide the user to the right resource they need, and will suggest the other bots for further questions if they are talking to the wrong specialized bot.

How we built it

A lot of our time was spent collecting and organizing data about the myriad different resources and organizations available at UCSC, as well as all the different actions that they can perform. While some of our group was doing this, we prototyped the front and back ends, and using the OpenAI Assistants API helped for comfortable integration of an AI chatbot, which we trained on our data. All avatar sprites were designed and created on Adobe Fresco, and then rendered in Medibang Paint Pro.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was compiling all the resources from the UCSC website. As we said before, there are a lot of resources with information hiding in the smallest of places. It was a very time consuming task to complete the database, which sacrificed our time for other aspects of the tool. Instead of having one person complete it on their own, we all helped to complete it together to get it done quicker, and allow ourselves to continue in the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Completing all the sprites for the individual avatars was something that we (Amber, really) worried about not being able to accomplish. Thankfully, they all came out nicely, and we think they make Sammy Support Crew friendly and approachable. We are also very proud of how the website looks now. At our last hackathon, we felt that we could’ve done a better job for UI/UX design, and finishing Sammy Support Crew made us a lot happier with how aesthetically pleasing it looks.

What we learned

One thing we definitely learned was the power of organization. It’s hard to pump out the perfect app in the constrained amount of time of a hackathon, so we realized it was essential for each member to have a task and accomplish it. We thought we wouldn’t be able to finish Sammy Support Crew in time, but through project management techniques and tools like Trello, we were able to finish it before losing our minds. We also learned a lot more about resources at UCSC. Taking on this project required us to dive deep into UCSC’s vast network of organizations while collecting data, and we discovered many resources we did not know about before, such as the ombudsman. We also each had our own individual learning experience: Sritha - I had never coded in TypeScript or JavaScript before, so taking on this project fast-tracked me into learning a new programming language. I also learned more about creating an API, since this is only the second time I have worked with one. Amber - I learned a lot about the importance of color selection and readability in UI design. Even if some colors look nice together, readability and effectiveness of the overall project is a higher priority. I also became more accustomed with Adobe Fresco during the creation of the different avatars in Sammy Support Crew. Max - I got to really experience the power of the OpenAI API by using their model with our appendix of data, which makes development super seamless, especially under the time constraints of the hackathon. I also worked a lot more with placeholders and other techniques to keep me unblocked and productive and able to work while depending on others’ tasks. (concurrency!) Manuel - There is a lot of groundwork you have to lay, information that needs to be ready and available when our tool tries to extrapolate it from our bank. I learned it’s important to gather all the data it’s required to pull from, and formatting it so that the AI can learn and regurgitate said info

What's next for The Sammy Support Crew

The next step for Sammy Support Crew is to continue fixing the tiny errors and make it more sustainable in the long-run. We also imagine creating something with a similar concept for each of the other UC campuses, since we understand this tool could be beneficial for students at other universities. In terms of the technical, we plan on using more AI to even better identify quick actions for the user to take, as well as collecting more training data. Additionally, expanding beyond the hackathon, we would like to add user accounts both for security and keeping a record of past conversations, as well as additional security features on the back end.