Introducing: Ask Arbor – powered by OpenAI

Amy Underdown - 8 June, 2023

Product release

Category : Blog

Introducing: Ask Arbor – powered by OpenAI

Have you Asked Arbor that?

Today I’m super excited to introduce Ask Arbor – your new collaborator and assistant in Arbor, powered by OpenAI.

Ask Arbor is built seamlessly into Arbor MIS, and is designed to turn your words into actions wherever you see it pop up.

Want to know how attendance compares across year groups this term? Ask Arbor. Need to draft a difficult letter to parents and guardians this morning? Ask Arbor. Looking for a quick way to create a student report? You can Ask Arbor that too.

Ask Arbor is designed to reduce busywork, make it simpler to get the data you need, and bring ideas to life. All of which should give you back your time for more strategic work, more time spent making use of your data, and more time with students and staff.

Here’s a sneak preview of what Ask Arbor can do:

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Answer questions and build reports

Ask Arbor a question, and it will come back with an answer in plain English. Ask Arbor will also show you the data informing its answer as a custom report which you can edit, download, and share with colleagues.

✔ Become a data superuser – Ask Arbor makes it simpler to create reports and find the information you need, especially for staff members who feel less confident with data

✔ Permissioning built-in by default – Because Ask Arbor creates reports in the Custom Report Writer, your Arbor permissions are automatically applied – making sure staff can only see the data they’re allowed to

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Draft an email, letter or SMS for you

Tell us the topic you want to write about, or provide a few prompts. Ask Arbor will then create a draft for you to review and send. 

✔ Make Arbor into a copywriter! – Not sure how to phrase something? Need some time back this morning? Let Arbor know what your email, letter or SMS is about, tell it the tone of voice you want to adopt, and Ask Arbor will produce a draft in seconds

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Create an instant Student Report

Ask Arbor to use data in the Student Profile, and your own comments, to make a speedy report card for parents

✔ Save time, without compromising on detail – Ask Arbor will summarise key data points about your students, and combine it with written comments from you, to produce a quick report for parents. It will even add in comments to address your students directly!

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When and how will you be releasing Ask Arbor?

I wanted to end by giving some insight into the way we’ve gone about designing and building Ask Arbor. Together with our parent company, The Key Group, we’ve been reflecting on the social and ethical implications of AI, and studying the work of organisations like The Institute for Ethical AI in Education and the Council of Europe.

From this, we have developed five core principles that will underpin our upcoming AI development. Through working closely with our colleagues at The Key Group, our goal is to lead the way in taking an ethical, transparent and school-first approach to implementing AI in our platforms. You can read more about our five core principles here.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that Ask Arbor is an experiment and, like all AI tools, may give inaccurate or inappropriate responses. We’ll be rolling it out (and adding more actions to its repertoire) very soon – your feedback will be critical in helping to make it as useful as possible. Watch this space (and catch our demo at Bett!) – we can’t wait to hear what you think.