Voice and chat in one channel, three languages, trained only on the institution's own admission policies, and built to hand off to a human counsellor the moment the stakes rise.
ClientConfidential. India.
SectorHigher education, admissions
ServicesAI architecture, conversation design, voice systems, evaluation, counsellor training
Timeline16 weeks to live
EngagementOngoing. Second admissions cycle.
01 / 05
Voice and chat in one channel.
Eighteen thousand applicants and one phone line. Applicants call or type, switch mid-conversation, and get the same answer either way, at any hour.
02 / 05
Three languages, one policy.
English, Hindi and one regional language, with one policy behind all three. The answer does not change with the language it is asked in.
03 / 05
Answers only from the institution's own policy.
The agent answers from the brochures, FAQs and policy memos we catalogued with the head of admissions, and from nothing else. A confident wrong answer would cost an applicant a year.
04 / 05
A hand-off the moment the stakes rise.
Anything outside the policy, and anything the agent is unsure of, goes to a counsellor at once, with the conversation attached. Refusal was the first feature, not the last.
05 / 05
The first hour, handled.
Every conversation logged, every handoff annotated, every refusal explained. Counsellors answer the questions that matter, and the institution has a record of its front line.
I / Context
The same fifteen questions, answered all day.
Counsellors spent most of their time on the same fifteen questions. Eligibility, fees, hostel availability, curriculum, visa paperwork. Important questions, answered the same way every time, in three languages, eleven hours a day. The people hired for the hard conversations were doing intake.
Leadership wanted the easy questions handled by a system, with a clean handoff to a human the moment judgment was needed. They did not want a chatbot. They wanted a copilot that could speak, listen, take notes, hand off, and never invent an answer.
II / Approach
Sixteen weeks. Built on refusal, not confidence.
The principle from day one: the agent's first job is to know what it does not know. Every conversation, every evaluation and every training session followed from it. The hardest engineering was in the refusals.
01
Policy ingestion
We spent a week with the head of admissions and catalogued every brochure, FAQ, policy memo and email template from the previous two cycles. The agent can answer only from that corpus. Anything outside it is an automatic handoff. General world knowledge was left out on purpose.
Weeks 1 to 4
02
Conversation design
Conversations in English, Hindi and one regional language. Voice and chat in the same flow, switchable mid-conversation. Every exchange logged, every handoff annotated, every refusal explained. Counsellors were trained on what the agent would and would not do, and signed off on each flow before launch.
Weeks 4 to 8
03
Build and evaluate
We built the agent, the voice layer, the handoff and the audit log, then evaluated against three hundred real questions from previous cycles. We refused to ship until the refusal-on-uncertainty rate passed ninety-two percent. Better that the agent fetches a counsellor than guesses.
Weeks 8 to 14
04
Live, then iterate
Released two weeks before the admissions cycle opened. The first cycle handled eighteen thousand applicants in thirty days, and counsellors' time went to the conversations that needed them. The second cycle is in flight, with refinements drawn from real handoffs.
Weeks 14 to 16
III / Outcomes
Counsellors back to doing counselling.
Applicants get faster answers, in their own language, at any hour. Every conversation is auditable, every handoff is clean, every refusal is logged. The institution now has a complete record of how its admissions process behaves at the front line, which it never had before.
18,000Applicants handled in the first thirty days
3langsEnglish, Hindi and one regional language
92%Refusal-on-uncertainty rate before launch
Audit completeEvery conversation logged, every handoff annotated, every refusal explained
The counsellors stopped answering the same fifteen questions. Now they answer the ones that matter.
Head of admissions · Higher education institution · India
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