For Teachers and Admins
AI Studio is a tool on the Vocareum platform that lets you build and manage AI assistants for use in your courses. You can create a custom assistant or attach an assistant created by other teachers within your organization to a course, and test it interactively before making it available to students. This article walks you through the two main areas of AI Studio: the Builder and the Assistants view.
The AI models and providers available to you in AI Studio are determined by your Generative AI (GenAI) API user keys and their associated policies. Organization Administrators can configure GenAI policies and provision user keys through Vocareum's GenAI Gateway.
Navigating to AI Studio
From the Vocareum Courses page, click AI Studio in the left sidebar.
AI Studio has two pages, accessible from the left panel:
Builder: where you create and manage assistants
Assistants: where you view and test assistants available to you
Builder
The Builder is where you create and manage your AI assistants. When you open the Builder, you will see a table listing assistants. Use the dropdown at the top of the page to filter the view:
Owned by me: assistants you have created
My Organization: all assistants shared within your organization
Each row in the table displays the assistant's name, description, and authors (the users who have editing access to it), along with action buttons for sharing and deleting.
Creating an Assistant
Clicking + Create at the top right corner in the Assistant Builder opens a configuration panel at the bottom where you can define your assistant's behavior and settings. The panel has two sections: the assistant configuration on the left, and a Knowledge Base on the right.
To set up your assistant:
Enter a Description of what the assistant does. This is displayed in the Builder table and helps you and other teachers identify the assistant.
Enter a Prompt context to provide the assistant with background instructions or framing. For example, the subject area it should focus on or the tone it should use when responding.
Select a GenAI API Key from the dropdown. This is the Vocareum GenAI key that will be charged when users send messages to the assistant. The keys available here are configured by your Organization Administrator through the GenAI Gateway.
Optionally, click View next to Advanced Settings to configure additional options:
Temperature: controls how deterministic or creative the assistant's responses are. Lower values produce more consistent, predictable responses; higher values produce more varied, creative ones. The default is 0.5.
Publish assistant: check this box when you are ready to make the assistant available to users after testing.
File Attachment: allows users to attach files to their messages when interacting with the assistant.
Restrict sources: the assistant will only consult its Knowledge Base when generating responses, rather than drawing on broader model knowledge. Note that this will limit the variety and creativeness in the assistant's responses.
Link sources: the assistant will include links to Knowledge Base sources it referenced in its response.
Enable chat memory: the assistant will retain context from the last 3 user prompts. Disabling this can reduce cost and improve response times.
To add files for the assistant to reference, click Upload in the Knowledge Base section to upload documents.
When you have finished configuring the assistant, click Build in the Knowledge Base section to finalize it. Building may take a few minutes.
Click Save at the top right of the assistant configuration panel to save any changes to the general or Advanced Settings.
Once built, your assistant will appear in the Builder table under Owned by me.
Sharing an assistant
You can share an assistant with specific users, with one or more courses, or across your entire organization. Users you share with can view and interact with the assistant but cannot edit, share, or delete it; only assistant authors have those permissions.
To share an assistant, click the Share button in the Actions column. A Share Assistant panel will open. Enter Vocareum account email addresses in the Share with users field to share with specific individuals and click save.
Assistants
The Assistants view is where you can test any assistant available to you before adding it to a course assignment. The left sidebar organizes assistants into two categories:
My Assistants: assistants you have created
Shared With Me: assistants that other users in your organization have shared with you
Testing an assistant
Click an assistant's name in the sidebar to open it. Type a message in the chat input at the bottom of the page and press the send arrow to start a conversation. From the chat interface, you can also switch between available models, upload files, and clear the conversation history to start a fresh session.
Attaching an Assistant to an Assignment
Once you have created and published an assistant in AI Studio, you can make it available to students by selecting it within an assignment part in Resources.
Scroll down to the Generative AI section, and in the dropdown for Default Assistant you can find and select an assistant that has been shared with this organization or this specific course. There is also a default Vocareum assistant if you do not need a custom assistant. To learn more about using GenAI in assignments, refer to GenAI in Vocareum Labs.