Don’t you hate it when you spend 20 minutes trying to find information on the wrong website or have to stand in long lines in Day Hall?

Cornell students can skip all that and now go straight to AskEzra, an interactive Web service that will field typical questions asked of the Offices of the University Registrar, Bursar, Graduate School, and Financial Aidand Student Employment. Links to AskEzra have been added to the Web pages of those departments.

“One of the reasons all these offices wanted to come together around this tool is that we understand the clear differences between offices, but the student may or may not know who to go to, and searching through many pages of a website is not always the quickest way to get an answer,” said Jason Kahabka, assistant dean for student services and admissions in the Graduate School. “You can ask a question, and you don‘t have to ask the right office.”

The automated system searches for keywords and phrases in typed-in questions and matches them with a knowledge base of frequently asked questions. “It checks against every question in the database, gives it a score for how well it matches and returns the best answer,” explained Kelley Sullivan, who managed the technical implementation of the system for Student and Academic Services. The response will often include links to departmental websites for further information.

“There are days when there are dozens of students standing in line,” said University Registrar Cassie Dembosky. “We want to put the information at their fingertips as opposed to having to call us.” The service also will benefit faculty and staff, Dembosky said. Hopefully, she said, administrative offices will receive fewer calls, and faculty advisers will be able to concentrate on academic matters and use AskEzra to answer administrative questions like “When do I have to pay my bill?”

AskEzra will grow – slowly – Dembosky said. The questions are monitored and new answers, along with new ways people ask the same questions, are being added to the knowledge base. Other departments will have the opportunity to join in the future.

AskEzra is not to be confused with Dear Uncle Ezra, created in 1986 as what may have been the first online advice column, to answer questions about Cornell rules and eventually almost anything else until it was suspended last year. AskEzra will stick to administrative questions.

Since its launch in August, AskEzra has fielded nearly 5,000 questions and answered more than 4,100, Sullivan reported. Those not answered were outside the scope of the service, she said. Most frequent topics: tuition, financial aid and enrolling in classes.

The project grew out of a work group convened by Susan Murphy, vice president for student and academic services, charged with examining how services are delivered to students. AskEzra is powered by software from IntelliResponse, a company that provides “virtual agents” used by banks, utilities and, so far, a few universities, to interact with customers. The project was made possible by a generous donation from Liz ’73 and Mayo Stuntz Jr. ’71.