We realized that we had an opportunity to create a great experience for rising college freshmen regardless of visual acuity. College is supposed to be a place for everyone, so we figured the resources for those interested should be more inclusive as well.
College Chat program is a speech based chatbot that provides prospective University of Maryland students with any information they may be looking for regarding programs and admission.
We built the program around the use of AzureOpenAI with Python and Javascript. We were able to create a speech interface that remembered queries and implemented RAG in order to bolster the ChatGPT 3.5 LLM for our purposes.
Some challenges we ran into were getting speech to transfer to a web application as well as setting up our OpenAI resources to begin the project.
We're proud of developing a chatbot that people can use regardless of any potential visual impairment as well as for utilizing RAG and effectively training our model with diligently sourced data concerning the University of Maryland.
We learned a great deal over the course of the project, including how to make use of LLMs, scrape data using APIs, and implement speech interfaces.
The next step for College Chat is forming a new name
Type "python speech-to-speech.py"