UC Surabaya Students Leverage AI to Create Chatbot Yucca to Assist New Students
March 24, 2025
SURYA.co.id | SURABAYA – Students at Ciputra University (UC) Surabaya are utilising artificial intelligence (AI) to create an interactive chatbot called Yucca.
This chatbot is designed to help new students obtain important information about campus, including facilities, schedules, and even recommendations for boarding houses.
UC Surabaya’s Director of AI and Technology Transformation, Dr Trianggoro Wiradinata MEngSc CDSS, revealed that this project emerged 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, 2025).
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 the Yuka character.
“This innovation proves that cross-disciplinary collaboration can produce technology-based solutions that benefit the campus community,” he concluded.
Willas Daniel Rorrong Lomban Tobing, a member of the Informatics team, 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 make the Yucca visuals produce sounds,” Willas added.
Meanwhile, the data used in the chatbot was collected through 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,” Willas said.
Meanwhile, Gerald Hartanto from the Visual team explained that creating the Yuka character began with determining her personality and traits.
The development process included storyboarding, rigging to provide movement for the character models, and adjusting the size and format to ensure compatibility with the system developed by the programming team.
“The rigging and storyboarding process took about a month, while integration with the programming system took about a week,” explained Gerald.