AI-Powered Student Assistant Chatbot for the Department of Technical Education

Abstract: Students and parents seeking information about technical education frequently depend on websites, telephone calls, emails, and personal visits to obtain admission-related and academic information. These channels can become difficult to manage during admission periods because information is distributed across multiple sources and administrative staff must repeatedly answer similar questions. This paper proposes an AI-powered student assistant chatbot for the Department of Technical Education, Maharashtra, designed as a centralized conversational interface for common student and stakeholder enquiries. The proposed system focuses on admission procedures, eligibility criteria, available institutes and programmes, fee information, scholarships, curriculum, hostel facilities, previous-year allotment information, and placement-related information. A retrieval-oriented architecture is proposed so that responses can be grounded in an approved departmental knowledge base rather than relying only on unrestricted generative output. The methodology combines requirements analysis, knowledge-base preparation, natural-language processing, intent/query understanding, document retrieval, response generation, and human-oriented evaluation. Literature on educational chatbots and admission consultation shows that conversational systems can improve accessibility and response speed, while accuracy, outdated information, hallucination, privacy, multilingual interaction, and evaluation remain important challenges. The proposed framework therefore treats the chatbot as a decision-support and information-access system, with escalation to official human channels for uncertain or sensitive queries. The study provides a practical foundation for developing and evaluating a centralized technical-education information assistant.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Educational Chatbot, Student Assistant, Natural Language Processing, Technical Education, Admission Support, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Maharashtra