Quick start

UIUC.chat is the easiest way to train your own LLM and share it like a google doc.

Upload your documents (or use our built-in web crawler) then chat with them. Ask them questions, use it like search, ask it to review or improve your grant proposals, and lots more. It’s great at QA over an unlimited number of docs (some projects have millions of documents).

Short and sweet introduction to UIUC.chat

Why UIUC.chat?

• Control Over Your Information Sources: Unlike vendor-driven sites like ChatGPT, all API interactions are contractually hidden and do not train on your data. You have full control over your information sources.

• Source Citation: Our chatbot provides source citations, allowing you to click through and trace back to the documents you uploaded.

• Robust Features: Enjoy robust authentication, sharing, monitoring, and support for many different language models.

• User Analytics: When you share your AI assistant as a learning tool, Illinois Chat provides analytics on how users interact with it. This helps you better understand your audience’s needs, allowing you to tailor your content and improve their learning experience.

Top Use Cases

1. AI Teaching Assistant: Create a virtual assistant for your courses that provides expert answers, cites sources, and encourages students to explore primary documents. It even integrates with Canvas.

2. Literature Review: Upload your academic PDFs or research papers, and let the chatbot help you identify relevant information and citations for your writing projects.

3. Project Onboarding Companion: Integrate resources like GitHub repos and PDFs to efficiently onboard team members—the chatbot becomes a helpful guide through your project materials.

4. Advanced Search Tool: Enhance your search capabilities by using Illinois Chat over your curated content, making information retrieval fast and reliable.

Creating a new project

Connecting canvas

Connect canvas on the materials page

You must invite our bot for your course as a TA. The email address is [e-mail]

Setting up OpenAI API key

For a great experience bring your own OpenAI API key. We also support Azure OpenAI, and Anthropic.

How to set up a tutor mode

These series of walkthroughs are about system prompt and different ways you can customize them. The very first one is a helpful teaching assistant. We call this prompt "tutor mode".

Document-Based References Only System Prompt

Restricts AI to use only information from the provided documents.

Bypassing UIUC.chat's internal prompting

Bypasses internal prompting and citations.

Using the API

We have a full API that developers can use to interact with the website. Get started in these docs:

1. Generate the API Key

2. Use the API authenticated with api key