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On April 1, the Information Technology (IT) department announced their AI chatbot “Informaton,” a robotic squirrel able to answer IT’s most asked questions, such as wifi connection and password resetting.
According to the chatbot’s biography, Informaton is the help desk’s “savvy squirrel-powered sidekick” who “traded acorns for algorithms to pursue his deep digital desire to help our community with their technology problems via text and email.”
Director of Instructional Technology and User Services Chris Gott said he became the head of the project after gaining inspiration for the persona of the AI chatbot.
Gott said that when he began working at Albion, Director of Information Technology Eric Beadle gave him a few older IT shirts to wear as he introduced himself to the rest of the staff. When talking to Mark Bollman, professor of mathematics, Gott was told that his shirt was misspelled; “information” was missing its second “i.”
The spelling mistake of “informaton” sounded like a robot squirrel, Gott said in an offhand joke, and Beadle agreed, saying it could be their department mascot. The next day, Gott said, Beadle came in with an AI video of a robot squirrel, and at that point, the gag had “staying power.”
“Then we decided that we wanted to build a chatbot for people,” Gott said. “And it wasn’t even a question: The chatbot’s name is Informaton.”
Gott and Beadle worked together with Google Gemini to create visuals for Informaton, who ended up being a black squirrel with a purple shirt that says “Help Desk.”
“In a nod to Mark Bollman, who started this whole thing off, Informaton always wears red Converse high tops,” Gott said.
Both Gott and Beadle said one “hole” the IT department has been trying to fill is inaccessibility to students after hours. The IT department had chatbots in the past, Beadle said, but they were “dry and boring.”
“One of the goals was to make it more engaging, something fun, something that people would enjoy using,” Beadle said.
According to Gott, another goal of Informaton is to help students “get the answers they need at 2 a.m. when something goes weird.”
Beadle said the department is figuring out the best way to “take advantage” of Google’s variety of AI tools, such as Google Gemini and NotebookLM, to “decrease our workload, but also to provide a greater level of service.”
The team behind Informaton has tested various iterations of the chatbot, and one of their next goals is for the AI to be able to reach students through email. However, Beadle said one roadblock is how quickly AI tools evolve, forcing them to start over with every new update.
“The balance is going to be the trick, and we’re working our way through it,” Beadle said.
Dallas first-year and IT department employee Stephanie Hernandez said that in the instructions they give the AI, they use “neutral” language such as “select” instead of “click” for users who have vision or hearing impairments.
“It’s not that unfriendly; it’s just something simple and easy to use,” Hernandez said.
At this stage, Hernandez said Informaton is “like a baby,” but the IT department will continue to refine the chatbot so it’s better equipped to help people.
Gott said the bot often adds new aspects to its personality that it wasn’t told to, such as calling the user a “tall human” and computers “glowing rectangles.”
According to Beadle, part of the reason the IT department released Informaton at this time is because “there’s still activity on campus.”
“Hopefully for August we’ll be ready for prime time,” Beadle said.
So far, Gott said there has been some traffic every day on Informaton’s website, and at this stage, he’s “happy with how that’s been going.” Along with asking questions, Gott said users have been giving Informaton “gifts,” or emojis of trees and nuts that the bot will have a squirrel pun for.
One user, Mason senior Grace Halstead, said she was “annoyed” when she first heard about Informaton, and wanted to test it out to see if it “actually” answered her questions.
When Halstead asked Informaton what it could do, she said it would always give her a different answer. Halstead added that she asked Informaton how to add a class, and it gave her an unclickable link; when asked how to drop a class, the chatbot said that task was “too hard.”
“So you can’t do two very simple things that any FYE (First Year Experience) mentor or anyone who’s actually employed by Albion College could actually show you,” Halstead said.
Halstead also thought the AI art looked “tacky,” and the way Informaton answered questions was “strange” and “weirdly” worded.
“I don’t need a chatbot to have a conversation with. If I’m coming to a chatbot, I have a question,” Halstead said.
Gott said that for the “foreseeable future,” Informaton is “a shortcut that will point you to the people at any given opportunity.
“I’ve been incredibly explicit with my help desk staff that at no point in any way here is any of our AI efforts aimed at trying to replace our jobs,” Gott said.
Instead of replacing staff, Gott said Informaton is meant to “lighten the load” and allow them to put more energy towards the harder questions.
“This is a tool that can allow us to try to meet people’s needs better than we were before,” Gott said.
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