The voice AI alternative "IPPOLIS Chat(Opens in a new tab) " from Fachhochschule Dortmund is significantly smaller, more economical and more secure than its world-famous counterparts Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot. It also has exclusive Fachhochschule Dortmund expertise.
It began in early 2022 as a chatbot project by Prof. Dr. Sven Jörges and Andre Maria Cordes for the computer science students at Fachhochschule Dortmund. The bot was intended to help with general questions about studying and link to helpful information and offers. The way it worked was comparatively simple: the right answer was to be found and displayed for each user question from the pool of all answers.
In November 2022, OpenAI published the large language model ChatGPT and unleashed an unprecedented AI triumph. All of a sudden, every chatbot looked old. After a short transition phase, Prof. Jörges' team discontinued the chatbot and focused on variants with generative AI.
Info-GPT is online
With success: as "Info-GPT(Opens in a new tab) ", the result is now online, helps with questions about courses, gives tips on assignments and projects, provides learning resources, finds contact persons and much more. With one or two updates per semester, the available knowledge remains up to date.
The FH creature doesn't want to compete with the mountains of knowledge that Claude, Copilot and ChatGPT can siphon off. "But there are areas that the big LLMs can't see into," says Prof. Jörges. "Fachhochschule Dortmund is one such area. When it comes to this, our Info-GPT can be very helpful."
Good and green
And Info-GPT does not require environmentally harmful server farms in the countryside or AI satellites in orbit like the large AI services. Instead, one server and one graphics card are enough to easily handle the current workload of up to 50 simultaneous requests. Because the hardware is at the location, no data is leaked into the world. Safe, smart and sustainable.
The IPPOLIS project
"IPPOLIS Chat" is one of four sub-projects of the IPPOLIS project and is funded by the federal and state initiative "Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education". IPPOLIS stands for "Intelligent support of project- and problem-oriented teaching and integration into study processes". It aims to promote new AI-based learning support at the Faculty of Computer Science.
In a larger case study in the "Data Science Project" course in October, all four sub-projects were used together to familiarize students with the everyday life of a data scientist, including guided procedures with "IPPOLIS Scaffolds", statistical surveys with "IPPOLIS Analysis", exchanges with experts/industry partners via chatbots and the writing of a scientific report with "IPPOLIS Write".