New chatbot app to help students is in the works

Creators want Keaty to help with student questions and time management

NewsMaria Cholakova — Published March 4, 2025 2 minutes

App creators Vicky Leia Liu and Taief Ahmed say that Keaty aims to help students manage their study time and track assignments, among other things. 

According to the creators, the app has two main uses for students. One part of the app is aimed at answering common student questions. Another use for the app is a smart calendar function, which can be tailored to each student’s classes and habits.

In order to make the app as student-friendly as possible, the Keaty team surveyed over 200 students to help narrow down the most useful functions for the app.  

The creators say the inspiration behind creating Keaty came from personal struggle. More precisely, it came from Ahmed’s struggles with transferring his program of study from software engineering to electrical engineering. 

“The easiest way would have been to just ask an advisor, but I didn't want to waste their time,” Ahmed said. “So I thought, wouldn't it be nice if there was a chatbot that just answered the most basic, frequently asked questions about universities? And I thought, you know what, we definitely can build such a thing with the recent advancements in large language models.” 

Once they started working on Keaty, the team applied for Phase I of the Gina Cody Research and Innovation Fellowships. The funding provides students with up to $15,000 to fund innovative ideas at the university. 

After pitching the idea to a team of judges, Keaty’s creators were awarded $10,000 for their project. 

Since the creation of Keaty, the team has spent over $4,000 on creating the app. Half of that money went to honorariums for the app developers and around $1,000 was dedicated to training the neural network. Other miscellaneous costs included an Apple developer license and marketing.  

Leia Liu and Ahmed hope the app will be ready for students to download in April, but right now, they said they are focused on the app’s beta testing. 

They hope that student beta tests will help make the app as effective as possible.

They also hope to collaborate with the Concordia Student Union (CSU) on promoting the app to increase their reach.

“If our app can help us, it can definitely help all the students,” Ahmed said. “So the help of the CSU [could] spread the usage for all students [to] also benefit from that.” 

This article originally appeared in Volume 45, Issue 10, published March 4, 2025.