Campus chatbot reveals latest updates, functions

As the fall semester kicks off, Tommy Bot, the University’s first campus chatbot, is updated and ready for use by the USC community.

Developed by sophomores Mimi Tran Zambetti and Justin He, alongside juniors Samuel Breck and Will Durkee, Tommy Bot’s beta version was launched in Spring 2017 as a project in LavaLab, a startup incubator at USC.

The team behind Tommy Bot was inspired to look at common issues facing students, and wanted to create solutions for those not familiar with the campus or college life.

“Pretty early on in our years we were trying to figure out what’s a problem, what’s a pain point that a lot of students felt coming into college,” Tran Zambetti said. “[They’re] really easy questions you can answer, but for some reason the information’s kind of harder to find through your browser. If you can aggregate it, you can make it really easy to access just by texting someone.”

From there, Tommy Bot was created. The user-friendly interface is accessible on Facebook Messenger, and the bot engages the user in a simulated conversation to help them find a location, an event or the hours that a building is open.

“Since we initially started Tommy Bot, we gained a significant amount of users,” said Breck, one of the bot’s programmers. “Now that we’re getting larger, we have to consider the volume of users that we’re getting, we certainly need to scale our project [so it can handle more users] and just hold it up to a higher standard for a larger audience.”

According to He, Tommy Bot currently receives 500 to 600 uses a day, but the number of total users is higher, at around 1,000. Additionally, Tommy Bot’s Facebook page has 377 likes and counting.

Since the summer, the team has expanded Tommy Bot’s areas of expertise to include the Village and its vendors, alongside their hours and services. This week, the team hopes to roll out club searches and additional events.

The artificial intelligence, He said, will also be more refined and easy to use in comparison to their beta mode last semester.

The bot now also features on-campus events, and the team is working to integrate Facebook events that occur at and around USC onto the platform.

The team also hopes to integrate a club directory to help users find organizations according to their interests.

Tommy Bot received a $10,000 grant through the Iovine and Young Academy Prize in April.

To win the prize, contestants pitched their ideas to a panel of industry experts who weighed in and ranked the most innovative ideas.

“At the end of the competition, a lot of the teams had been awarded some form of money, but we ended up getting the $10,000 prize,” Tran Zambetti said. “Dean [Erica] Muhl  was telling us about how $10,000 would push Tommy Bot a lot farther than it could for any of the other projects that had been pitched. They’d been impressed by the users and the retention rates we’d gotten.”

With money and support from the university, the team behind Tommy Bot has been able to work closer with USC to get more detailed information to provide the most accurate answers possible. This collaboration has helped them to find ways to increase user retention rates.

The Tommy Bot creators have also invested in virtual marketing this past summer, specifically targeting freshmen, to expand their user base.

“Most chatbots in the nation have struggled with keeping their users because a lot visit chatbots, message it once or twice and never use it again,” He said. “We’re working towards finding use cases — functions and features students will use on a day-to-day basis — so users keep coming back.”