LOLA — AI administrative chatbot for student admissions at Universidad de Murcia

LOLA is a natural language processing chatbot built by 1MillionBot and deployed by Universidad de Murcia in June 2018. The university's Student Information Service (SIU) handled around 28,000 admission-related queries each year, concentrated into short summer peaks when EBAU exam results, cut-off grades, and pre-registration deadlines triggered a flood of student contact.

Built on Google Dialogflow, LOLA operates 24/7 and answers questions about entry scores, score reviews, enrolment procedures, and campus services. In its first four-month pilot (June–September 2018), the system handled 11,988 conversations from 4,183 students, resolving 35,653 individual queries at a 93.4% accuracy rate. By 2019, cumulative use reached 74,000+ conversations with 25,000 students, with accuracy rising to 94.2%.

Before LOLA, the university had to hire temporary staff each summer to manage the admissions surge. After deployment, staff could focus on non-routine or complex cases while LOLA absorbed routine queries around the clock. This shift also benefited students who could not reach the office during business hours — a practical equity gain for prospective applicants across Spain.

Universidad de Murcia described LOLA as the first AI administrative assistant in a Spanish public university and noted it learns continuously from each interaction. Fordham University Law School and multiple academic publications on AI in higher education have cited it as a successful case study.

Read the full analysis: https://www.um.es/web/sala-prensa/-/la-universidad-de-murcia-presenta-a-lola-un-asistente-de-inteligencia-artificial-para-ayudar-a-los-nuevos-alumnos