A chatbot that answers visitor questions at Georgia Aquarium

The situation

Georgia Aquarium gets a constant stream of the same questions. Where is the whale shark. When is the next feeding. Is this exhibit good for a four-year-old. Which way to the dolphins. The answers came from people standing on the floor, all day, repeating themselves, while the questions that needed a person waited in the same line.

Georgia State University wanted to test whether an assistant could take that load, and asked us to build it.

What we built

A chatbot that knows the aquarium. We collected the material visitors ask about and built a knowledge base from it. The chatbot uses retrieval-augmented generation: for every question it first finds the relevant pieces of the aquarium’s own content, then writes an answer from those pieces. That keeps the answers tied to what the aquarium actually says, so it does not make up a feeding time.

The knowledge base is the part the aquarium controls. When a schedule changes or an exhibit opens, the content is updated and the chatbot answers from the new version.

Where it is now

The chatbot is piloted inside the aquarium with real visitors. The routine questions get an immediate answer wherever the visitor is standing. Staff time goes to the questions and the moments that need a person, and a visitor who wants to know where the penguins are does not have to find someone to ask.

The project ran from March to May 2026 and was delivered on the agreed schedule. The client reviewed it on Clutch with five stars for quality, schedule, cost and willingness to refer.