Background

The concept for this class of AI assistant is to act as a performance enhancement tool (PET) for teachers, curriculum owners, and program managers. I refer to this type of AI assistant as TeachersPET. TeachersPET can be given the curriculum materials for any course or program through a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework and vector store implementation. In simple terms, by giving the AI assistant all of the curriculum materials, the AI assistant can use the materials to answer learner questions. This enables summarization of course content, supporting learners with specific learning tasks, helping to locate and guide learners to key information. Through a RAG implementation, we significantly reduce the chance of hallucinations, which is an incorrect or misleading result that AI models can generate.

To quickly embed the assistant on the page, I've used a tool called Predictable Dialogs. This enabled me to deploy an assistant on my website without having to code a proxy server or custom front end. Predictable Dialogs also saves a record of all conversations with the chatbot, providing insights into how learners are interacting with and using TeacherPET.