A UNIVERSITY ENQUIRY CHATBOT SYSTEM

Abstract

Communication of prospective students and other type of customers with the university is usually done manually and is a very time-consuming process. The opportunity for one-to-one conversation is highly valued but in most cases one-to-one conversations are not feasible with many hundreds of applications each year. The communication would involve an academic staff member to spend several hours finding appropriate responses and contacting each user. Reducing expenses and time would be helpful by creating a compelling chatbot, the project seeks to decrease the strain on the admissions and possibly other users. Therefore, the aim of this project is to design and implement an enquiry chatbot system that can be integrated into the school website to aid getting accurate and reliable information about the university. A suitable algorithm was devised to search through the set of data and find a potential answer. The program then replies to the user and provides a fallback message containing contact numbers and email the user can forward their queries if the user is not satisfied by the answer provided by the bot. An algorithm that combines keyword matching with string similarity was used to implement this project. Dialogflow framework was used to satisfy this. Furthermore a web interface is provided for both users and an administrator. The result showed that students or intending customers would be able to access accurate information about the university in a limited amount of time and at the tip of their fingers through the use of the chatbot. It was concluded that Mountain Top University is regarded to contribute to the development so as to keep this project alive that is to enhance further development like integrating the bot into other platforms like Facebook, slack, twitter etc. so as to reach a larger audience thereby creating awareness for the university.