Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), has partnered with AI provider CloudMile to enhance its student virtual assistant, Lyon Bot.
NTU initially introduced Lyon Bot in 2020 to assist nearly 6,000 freshmen with enrollment, easing the administrative burden on university staff. The original system, built on Google Dialogflow Essentials, faced challenges adapting to evolving student needs and required laborious manual data tagging and updates.
“With the new AI-powered chatbot, we are currently saving around 14.5 days’ worth of work every month,” said Alvin Ong, Chief Information Officer of NTU. “This allows our staff to focus on tasks that require human insight and creativity.”
By integrating Google’s Gemini large language model (LLM), the upgraded AI chatbot delivers faster, more accurate responses to student inquiries, especially on accommodation, boosting engagement while streamlining administrative tasks and saving the university over 14 days of manual work each month.
“We are transitioning from an intent-based Natural Language Processing chatbot to a GenAI chatbot for student housing inquiries to enhance flexibility, scalability, and user experience,” said Mr. Ng Kee Haur, Deputy Director, Enterprise IT, Centre for IT Services at NTU. “While GenAI can handle complex, unstructured queries, there is still a role for the intent-based chatbot in specific scenarios. This hybrid approach allows us to balance efficiency with precision.”
With CloudMile’s expertise, NTU has now advanced Lyon Bot into a Generative AI-powered system. The new version employs multi-layer processing—including query understanding, demand classification, and answer generation to retrieve information in real-time from multiple centrally managed data sources. This has markedly improved conversational accuracy and response speed, significantly reducing error rates.
This collaboration highlights CloudMile’s technical depth in Generative AI application and data governance, as well as its capabilities in delivering complex international projects. CloudMile provided customized consulting services and system integration tailored to the specific needs of the educational institution, assisting NTU in building a stable and scalable AI conversational framework.
Jeremy Heng, Managing Director, Southeast Asia at CloudMile, commented, “The transformation of NTU’s Lyon Bot is a testament to our commitment to enhancing human-computer interaction through AI. CloudMile will continue supporting institutions and enterprises in leveraging AI for innovation excellence.”
