On Custom AI Assistants 🤖 By Burak Tunca • Read Time: 3 min Hello Everyone!
Let’s admit, as teachers and admins we all face a common frustration: the endless cycle of answering repetitive questions via email.
How often have you found yourself buried in a sea of messages, explaining the same concepts over and over? Or worse, how many times
have you been caught in a wild goose chase, forwarding emails from person to person, just to find an answer to what should be a simple
query?
AI can save us from this hassle. Imagine having a tireless assistant at your fingertips, one that you’ve personally trained with your expertise.
This digital ally could handle those routine inquiries, freeing you to focus on the more complex aspects of your work.
This isn’t science fiction – it’s the here and now. Custom AI assistants, tailored to your specific knowledge base and capable of
responding solely with information you’ve provided, are revolutionizing workplace efficiency. Let’s learn more about them in this issue.
Have a nice weekend!
Burak |
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What are custom AI Assistants and how can they help us? | 🦾 |
AI assistants (also called agents or bots) are like smart digital helpers that can be trained to understand and
handle specific tasks. Think of them as virtual team members who can answer common questions, find information quickly,
and help with routine stuff. These assistants learn from the information you give them, so they can respond to queries
just like a well-informed colleague would. They’re designed to make our job easier by taking care of repetitive tasks,
allowing you to focus on more important aspects of your work.
To give examples, for teachers, AI assistants can answer common course-related questions:
The AI can respond to students’ frequently asked questions about syllabus, deadlines, or assignment requirements;
and for admins, AI can answer questions about application processes, deadlines, and required documents or
provide information about benefits or leave policies.
To better illustrate this, I created a custom AI assistant that is trained on the policy documents regarding
rules and regulations around recording a lecture at Lund University. If we had a question about that,
we would either spend time surfing the LU staff pages to find and read the document or email others hoping that they know.
In the AI world, we could just talk to the relevant assistant. Let’s see it in action:|
As you can see our assistant is ready to rock’n’roll! Let’s ask if our students
can just record without asking us. 
As you can see the assistant is programmed to answer in a specific pattern: First, a summary of the answer;
next, relevant quotations from the training document; and last, a disclaimer about the AI output and a link to the actual policy document.
Let’s ask one more question regarding sharing the recordings: 
Now we can challenge the assistant little. Remember that is supposed to work only in the context of its task, in this chase
the recording policy. Now I will ask an unrelated question: 
Now imagine having several of such assistants, ready 24/7 to provide
all the routine questions students or staff might have. Wouldn’t that be awesome?
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