UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — How do I apply? When can I register for classes? How do I set up a payment plan? These questions, and many more, can now be answered with the help of artificial intelligence through a new chatbot, LionChat.
Designed to serve students and families around the clock, LionChat lives on Penn State’s admissions, student aid, registrar and bursar websites. The bot is trained to answer some of the most frequently asked enrollment-related questions by prospective, current, and former students. Over time, LionChat will learn additional answers to popular questions by crawling specific Penn State web pages.
“We’re excited to offer LionChat to our students and families as yet another tool to meet our future and current Penn Staters where they’re at. This AI technology will allow us to move towards our service goal of providing anytime, anywhere, anyplace service delivery, which is the type of service we have all become accustomed to in our daily lives,” said Matt Melvin, Penn State’s vice president of enrollment management.
LionChat’s current knowledge base is well-equipped to answer questions related to admissions processes, next steps, dates and deadlines, as well as frequently asked questions received by the Office of Student Aid, Office of the Bursar and Office of the University Registrar about scholarships, transcripts, tuition costs, billing, degree planning, grades, final exams and more. The tool will not only help students and families get immediate answers, but it is anticipated to reduce telephone and email volume, giving unit staff more time to improve and enhance other aspects of the service delivery experience.
“Using AI to help answer some of the most frequently asked questions we receive is an amazing addition to our resources. Not only will our students and families get the answers they’re seeking quicker, but this will also free up our front-facing staff time to devote to the personalized one-to-one interactions that matter most,” said Kim Emigh, Penn State’s director of undergraduate recruitment.
Future plans include expanding the functionality of LionChat to other enrollment-related units as well as integrating the platform with data in LionPATH to allow for more personalized student-specific questions related to financial aid and billing. The Enrollment Management team will continue to look for ways to integrate the tool into additional enrollment-related processes in the future.
Penn State’s Information Technology and Finance and Business teams collaborated with the units in Enrollment Management to make the LionChat launch a success.
Users can interact with LionChat at any time on the Admissions, Student Aid, Registrar and Bursar websites. In cases where LionChat is unable to provide an answer, the user will be prompted to fill out an inquiry form, alerting a staff member to review and respond within two business days. As always, speaking to a human directly is still available during normal business hours by calling or emailing the respective offices.