Helping New Students, UC Students Leverage AI with Chatbot Yucca

March 26, 2025

This innovation was created by students to create an interactive chatbot called Yucca. The chatbot is designed to help new students obtain important information about campus, including facilities, schedules, and even recommendations for boarding houses.

UC’s Director of AI and Technology Transformation, Dr Trianggoro Wiradinata, M.Eng.Sc, CDSS, revealed that this project was born from a competition held by UC. “The competition aimed to create a virtual assistant in the form of the campus mascot, Yuka, that could provide information in both voice and text via the official UC website,” he explained on Monday (March 24).

This collaboration involved two study programs: Informatics and Visual Communication Design (VCD). Informatics students utilised AI technology in their lectures, while VCD students developed the appearance and animation of Yuka’s character.

“This innovation proves that cross-disciplinary collaboration can produce technology-based solutions that benefit the campus community,” he concluded.

One member of the informatics team, Willas Daniel Rorrong, explained that the chatbot was developed using an Application Programming Interface (API). “The AI ​​technology we used included GBT AI to generate intelligent responses and Eleven Labs AI to create Yucca’s voice,” he explained.

Meanwhile, the data used in the chatbot was collected from UC’s internal website, including additional information about boarding houses around campus. “Our main challenge was adapting the design to make it attractive and acceptable to both teams,” said Willas.

Meanwhile, Gerald Hartanto from the Visual team explained that creating Yuka’s character began with determining her personality and traits. The development process included creating a storyboard, rigging to provide movement for the character model, and adjusting the size and format to ensure compatibility with the system developed by the programming team.