Exploring a retrieval-based AI assistant for higher education – looking for feedback

[Levy]

Hi everyone,

I’m exploring a new project idea focused on higher education: a retrieval-based AI chat assistant that answers student and staff questions strictly based on official academic documents (policies, regulations, syllabi).

The goal is to reduce repetitive support requests while keeping answers accurate and aligned with institutional rules.

I’d really appreciate input from people working in education IT:

• Where do policy-related questions create the most friction today?

• Would staff be comfortable with an AI system limited only to approved documents?

• What would be the biggest red flags or requirements from your perspective?

 

This is very much a work-in-progress, and I’m mainly looking for feedback and real-world perspectives.

[dmj]

https://notebooklm.google/ does this.

You curate the notebook with the approved data, then share it with people.  

[dhicks]

2 hours ago, dmj said:

You curate the notebook with the approved data, then share it with people.

 

Ah, so could we upload all our policy documents and then have a handy interface to query those? Can that interface be public and/or embeddable in a web page? It would be nice to be able to have, say, at the top of the "policies" section of the school website an embedded section saying "Ask a policy question".

[TechMonkey]

Copilot can be made to do this if you have Studio.  Point it at a SharePoint store and ask questions. We are looking at the possibility of that and making it so Pupils can ask questions of revision material and learning materials.

 

Copilot is currently the choice as it doesn't submit its data for learning and respects tenant security and rules.

[dhicks]

42 minutes ago, dhicks said:

It would be nice to be able to have, say, at the top of the "policies" section of the school website an embedded section saying "Ask a policy question".

 

Ah: no, it seems you can't currently make a Enterprise / Education Workspace account NotebookLM public. You can for a consumer account, though. API access to have the content of the NotebookLM auto-update is only available for Enterprise (not sure about Education), not consumer. It looks like the (Google) solution is to use the Gemini File Search API.

[psydii]

Adjunct, has anyone with A5 who also has a full Copilot licence had a  look to see if Anthropic/Claude is available now?

[dhicks]

8 hours ago, Levy said:

• Where do policy-related questions create the most friction today?

• Would staff be comfortable with an AI system limited only to approved documents?

• What would be the biggest red flags or requirements from your perspective?

 

Policy-related friction: I'm not quite sure exactly what that is - probably people aren't asking me about general school policies, so it's not something I think much about. People do ask me IT-related queries, though, and an AI to answer those might be handy. I've just tried putting some of our How-To documents into Google's NotebookLM. A reasonable result - I was able to ask it things like "How do I change my password?", "How much are replacement key fobs?", etc. The user interface would be a bit slow to add (or refresh) our whole document library in one go, so API usage there would be handy, and there is a limit of 300 resources in one Notebook, by the looks of things, but for an internal tool it looks very useful.

 

@TechMonkey mentions (Microsoft's) Copilot above, which sounds like it has similar capabilities. I don't think our staff would necessarily think about an AI system being limited to only approved documents, hence we currently limit them to using approved tools (Google Gemini for us). Red flags / requirements would simply be an AI system that wasn't based on an already-approved tool, hence needing some sort of separate approval process to be gone through before it could be used. Basically, a nice front end with a choice of a Gemini / Copilot backend as appropriate per school would be handy, any other backend would need separate approval.

 

I wonder how similar the features of, say, NotebookLM and whatever the Copilot equivalent is? For curriculum materials, I wonder if I could produce a bunch of documents (text, images, video and audio, by the looks of things), a folder's worth per subject, then a teacher could simply point a NotebookLM or similar at it for an instant AI chatbot on that subject. For history it might be useful / more engaging for replies to be first-person, as if the historical character is giving answers, although I'm not sure.

[dmj]

18 hours ago, TechMonkey said:

Copilot is currently the choice as it doesn't submit its data for learning and respects tenant security and rules.

 

Google offers the same: https://support.google.com/notebooklm/answer/16164461?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop

Your data is protected, and is not used to train NotebookLM unless you provide feedback.  When you share feedback to help us improve, we may review the full context of that interaction, including your queries, uploads, and the model’s responses.   

 

18 hours ago, dhicks said:

 

Ah, so could we upload all our policy documents and then have a handy interface to query those? Can that interface be public and/or embeddable in a web page? It would be nice to be able to have, say, at the top of the "policies" section of the school website an embedded section saying "Ask a policy question".

Afraid not, this is designed for internal use. 

 

17 hours ago, psydii said:

Adjunct, has anyone with A5 who also has a full Copilot licence had a  look to see if Anthropic/Claude is available now?

We've been using it for months with Google, Anthropic bill us via Vertex. Presumably you could set that up in ALM?

Edited December 19, 2025 by dmj

[jthompson]

On the Google front, rurther to NotebookLM, there is also Google AI Studio and Vertex AI. I've been meaning to set aside some time to kick the tyres on those, but my understanding is that your could use those to build a custom web app (or embeddable chat widget) that references whatever resources you want to point it at, whilst respecting said users' existing privileges on those resources. Student users would then not get responses that involve staff policies, etc.

 

I really like Google Cloud Search, so I'm imagining it would be an AI-ified equivalent of that.

 

That's my broad understanding of it without actually having done anything on that front.

[dhicks]

On 18/12/2025 at 07:00, Levy said:

I’m exploring a new project idea focused on higher education: a retrieval-based AI chat assistant that answers student and staff questions strictly based on official academic documents (policies, regulations, syllabi).

 

Did you have a go at testing / implementing anything yet?