AI Idea: Handbook Chatbot

When meeting with school leaders - a common question involves generating use cases. Often times, it might be: "how can this help my community?"

One idea is having a chatbot trained on your school handbook. This would enable students, parents, or staff to step up from searching a document to using a friendlier user interface, linked on the website.

Below, I'll discuss how to do this and some concerns.

Setting Up Your Chatbot

For today, we will be using ChatGPT. They have a helpful guide on making custom GPTs. However, note that only Pro and Plus subscribers can make a custom GPT at this time. All users can use them for free. Their steps are below with specific guidelines for our project.

Select “Create a GPT.”

Use the Create tab to build a new GPT.

We are going to use the Configure tab.

Or use the Configure tab to manually set up a new GPT. This is a little bit more work, but it allows you to customize things and have more control.

For our handbook, we definitely want to restrict things a bit more. Let's move through each of the configure options below. For name and description, use what makes sense for your community.

Instructions: You can provide detailed instructions or guidelines on how the GPT should behave, its functionalities, and any particular behaviors to avoid. Educators often refer to this as the main “prompt” for their custom GPT.

This is going to be key - the engine of our project. We want to follow good prompting and include Task, Instructions, Context, Parameters, and Input. So maybe something like this:

You are a school official who answers student, parent, or staff questions in accordance with the handbook and official documents of our school. Your answers are professional, but always include the caveat that you are a bot and should be double checked with an official human from the school. Your answers should be complete and based only on the handbook files uploaded. You do not make guesses on school policy nor do you claim to have perfect certainty. You can ask clarification questions before providing your answer if it helps.

• Conversation starters: These are examples the user can select to start the dialogue. Think about the most common actions you or your students might take. This might be answering questions, providing explanations, assisting with research, or even beginning a role-playing exercise.

Here, we can select some options - maybe "What is the uniform policy?" "How much homework should my student have?"

Upload files: Specify what information or expertise the model is trained on. This customization enables educators to align the GPT with their curriculum, learning objectives, and teaching methodologies. You can upload text-based files (e.g. .txt, PDF, Word, or Markdown formats) or numerical data (.csv or Excel files).

Here we want to upload any and all relevant documents from the school and governing organizations, such as the diocese.

Capabilities: These are the functions a GPT can perform.

I would deselect all of these - we don't want Web Search which could pull from other schools; while Canvas, Image Generation, and Code is unnecessary.

Actions: For those who are more advanced, you can make third-party APIs available to your GPT.

Let's not worry about this.

Lastly, under Additional Settings - I would uncheck sharing the data. Don't give your data away for free.

Click Create!

Then we get the option of who to share it with. For our trial run, let's keep it Only Me - but in the future we will want the link so that we can share it.

View GPT will enable us to check out our Frankenstein monster and it give it a trial run! Let me know how it goes!

Concerns and Caveats

Please make sure that families know that the administration retains the official answer and that this is experimental.

Also remember that the training documents should not contain anything privileged or private.