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.