From students for students

The special thing about the technical assistant: It was developed by students for students. And who knows the concerns of young academics better than they do? How practical that two current TUM students in Management & Technology, Henri Zalbertus and Jan Plüer, have taken on the project management for the chatbot: "We met at the TUM Campus Heilbronn and got on well straight away due to our competitive sports backgrounds," says Zalbertus. The two now share an apartment in Munich, have founded their own start-up and are working on the chatbot project with their team.

Application letter via hackathon

The two 23-year-olds quickly found a prominent advocate in Barbara Tasch, Managing Director of the TUM School of Management. "In November, we organized a hackathon by and with Microsoft as a kind of application event." The task: develop a functioning chatbot for student concerns in three days. Synergies were also used with Stephan Krusche, Professor of Information Engineering at TUM Campus Heilbronn. He developed a chatbot for programming tasks called Iris.

The team was quickly formed and the budget was provided by TUM, so they could get started. "It was quite something to guide so many people at once and then in such a complex context," Henri looks back. The first task was to collect data. Zalbertus and Plüer had to find out what the students‘ typical problems were. "We conducted interviews and evaluated anonymized emails." Then they fed their database with administrative information from the website and documents from the download center. That can be quite stressful, can’t it? "One of our greatest strengths is, if you ask others, rather our greatest weakness, that we are so homogeneous and basically never argue," says Zalbertus and laughs.

The starting line

Paige will be launched in mid-April. As with all chatbots, the rule of thumb of machine learning applies: what goes in comes out. The Welcome Day for the summer semester was the perfect opportunity to introduce the assistant, as many students at the Heilbronn and Munich campuses were starting their new phase of life on this day. They naturally have many questions. "The data is so fundamental that at the end you can see which documents need to be adjusted or deleted and whether the chatbot really provides helpful answers."

Henri sees the end of the project with one laughing and one crying eye: "Some people are very sad now. Our team of eight worked really well together, maybe we can get some of them to join our start-up." The success of the young managers and computer scientists shows what is possible with the right support. "Barbara Tasch placed a lot of trust in us, without her and the commitment of everyone involved, this would not have been possible."