PDP Presents at UAlbany’s First AI Symposium

Bryan Sotherden, Manager of Information Systems and Programming, presented on “Experimenting with Chatbots to Handle Routine User Support Requests” at UAlbany’s inaugural Artificial Intelligence Symposium held on September 21, 2022 at the SUNY Poly Nano Fab South building.

The Professional Development Program provides application development and hosts several high traffic public facing sites providing a wide range of services resulting in numerous repetitive user support requests. PDP is piloting using chatbots to improve customer service providing quicker replies while also removing staff from basic repetitive user questions and requests.

Freshdesk, the ticket system PDP currently uses offers AI powered chatbots. This bot was trained using human generated support email replies from actual user questions. The content of these emails was modified to question and answer format to train the AI powered bot.

While still early, results are favorable. Future plans include using APIs to further integrate the bot. For example, PDP supports NYS childcare providers looking to open a facility, resulting in thousands of requests to open new facilities. API integration will enable the bot to query our database, and instantly provide users with their daycare petition status.

The UAlbany Artificial Intelligence (AI) Symposium, an activity of the Albany AI Initiative, featured a set of lightning talks and moderated discussions to build understanding of interdisciplinary research initiatives underway or being planned at the University at Albany and the College of Nanoscale Sciences and Engineering, and involving, in some way, Artificial Intelligence. Read more about the symposium and see photos at https://www.albany.edu/ai/artificial-intelligence-symposium.