Graduate Course Advisor Chatbot

I want to give our graduate students an always-on academic advisor that speaks their language and knows our catalog inside out. The chatbot’s single, clear purpose is course selection advice: it should listen to a student’s goals, prerequisites already met, and term-by-term availability, then recommend an optimal path through core courses, electives, and any specialized tracks we offer. Reach is critical. The same conversational experience must run on our public website, live inside the mobile app students already use for grades, and extend to at least one social channel (Messenger or similar) so they can get guidance on the go. I’m agnostic about the underlying framework—Dialogflow, Rasa, Microsoft Bot Framework, or another scalable NLP stack are all fine as long as conversation flow remains natural and easy for staff to tweak. Data you will receive includes: • An up-to-date course catalog with prerequisites, credit weight, and term availability • Sample student profiles to seed training phrases • Access rules for each specialization track Please design the dialogue, build and train the model, connect it to our catalog data source, and surface it through embeddable widgets / SDKs for web, iOS/Android, and one social platform. A lightweight admin console for non-technical staff to add new courses or adjust logic is essential. Acceptance criteria • The bot proposes a valid semester-by-semester plan covering required core courses plus chosen electives or track within policy limits • It flags conflicts (time overlaps, unmet prerequisites) and suggests alternatives in the same session • Response time under two seconds on all channels during load testing • All integrations pass end-to-end testing in staging before launch • Setup and user guides delivered in clear markdown or PDF Hand-off is complete when the bot is live in production with documentation and a brief knowledge-transfer call.