AI HelpDesk RAG

Tech Stack

The Problem

• University students wasted hours digging through lengthy PDFs and outdated websites to find simple policy answers.
• No centralised, conversational tool existed for students to query campus handbooks and guidelines in real time.
• Support staff were overwhelmed by repetitive queries about admission policies, exam schedules, and campus rules.
• Static FAQ pages went stale quickly as policies changed, giving students outdated or contradictory information.
• New students especially lacked quick access to the institutional knowledge needed to navigate campus life effectively.

Our Solution

• Built a RAG-based chatbot combining web scraping of university websites with ingestion of student handbooks.
• Implemented a dual-model architecture: one model for document summarisation, another for conversational response generation.
• Designed a Streamlit interface optimised for ease of use, enabling students to get answers in plain conversational language.
• Created a vector database pipeline processing and indexing large university policy documents for semantic search.
• Optimised the retrieval pipeline to handle large datasets efficiently, maintaining fast response times at scale.

Impact

Resolved 70% of support queries without human intervention, dramatically reducing ticket backlog.