Meet Hopper!
Hopper is VIU's virtual support agent. It's designed to help you look for answers to all your VIU Technology related questions. Hopper can help you access knowledge base articles, create support tickets, and even search VIU's other websites!
Where Can I Find Hopper?
Hopper is found on the main VIU technology page. Look for a speech bubble in the bottom right corner!
Tips and Tricks
- Treat Hopper like an actual helper!
- Hopper functions better when you don't try to do it's "thinking" for it. Doing point form, keyword searches isn't it's strong suit. because of it's design, Hopper is much better using full sentence commands or questions. So, something like "tell me how to reset my password" will probably be more successful than "reset password".
- Actually use hopper
- We're still in the very beginning stages of utilizing a technology like this. Your participation in this process, asking questions and following prompts, will be instrumental in helping us shape what Hopper can do.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are we doing this?
Utilizing a Virtual Support Agent allows us to shift our employees to different tasks. A lot of what our agents do is repetitive and inefficient due to the changing IT landscape. With our resources limited, this path allows us to continue to innovate and grow without sacrificing the foundations of what it means to be an IT support team.
Is this stealing jobs/replacing the service desk?
Absolutely not! There will still be human eyes looking at and responding to your tickets, as well as building Hopper itself. Hopper's job is to find self serve options when they're available, and to gather information to pass on to technicians when they're not. This change simply removes a lot of the inefficient, repetitive work that our employees currently do, which leaves more time for them to make actual improvements long term.. Think installing sprinklers rather than just having someone standing in your house with a bucket of water. Surely there are other things that person can be doing, y'know?
Can I trust the answers Hopper gives?
Yes? (mostly). Hopper searches VIU websites, and provides the information that it finds. It's still dependent on lots of things:
- Is the information available where we asked it to look?
- Was it able to narrow down the answers enough, based on what you asked?
- Is the information it found (which a human wrote) actually correct?
Ultimately, like all computers/machines, Hopper will do what we tell it to. We being you, in the way you ask your question, and the IT department, in how we teach Hopper to find info. As in all things both human and non human, it's up to all of us to make sure the information helps us. Trust your gut if something feels off (and let us know about it when Hopper gets it wrong!)
Where does Hopper get it's responses?
Currently the knowledge that Hopper uses is restricted to information available on our technology.viu.ca site and CIEL's website. There are also guardrails in place regarding content safety filtering (hate, sexual, violence, self-harm), that prevent Hopper from eliciting or echoing sensitive personal information outside the support context, and refusing autonomous write actions or external API calls.
Is my personal information safe?
Short answer: Yes
Longer answer: Any personal information you provide through Hopper or within an IT support ticket is stored using secure systems and is only accessible to authorized individuals who require it to provide IT support services. Information is handled in accordance with VIU's privacy obligations and is not used to train AI models.
Examples of Information we may collect include:
- Business contact information (such as your name, VIU email address, or department)
- Employee or student number
- Current status at VIU (student, employee, retiree, etc.)
- Information relevant to resolving your support request
Personal information provided through Hopper or the ITS ticketing system may be accessible to:
- Authorized ITS staff while performing their assigned duties and supporting your request
- Authorized TeamDynamix (TDX) personnel operating under contractual, privacy, and security obligations when supporting the platform
- Microsoft Azure OpenAI, in limited circumstances where AI-powered features are used to process or generate responses
Information entered into Hopper is processed within VIU's TeamDynamix environment. According to TeamDynamix, customer data submitted through Hopper is not used to train AI models and remains within VIU's isolated environment. Access to information is restricted to those who require it to deliver and support the service.
If you would like more information about TeamDynamix's privacy, security, and AI practices, you can visit: https://trust.teamdynamix.com
What should I avoid sharing?
As with any support channel, only provide information that is necessary to resolve your issue. Avoid sharing sensitive personal information that is not relevant to your request (such as passwords, social insurance numbers, personal health information, or banking information).
If ITS requires specific personal information to verify your identity or complete a request, we will only ask for the information necessary to perform that work.
Why isn't it giving me an answer/the right answer/more help?
Hopper is only as good as the information we've asked it to look at. It's also really, really new. As much as we'd love for Hopper to be an absolute unit right from the hop (no pun intended), a lot of what's going to make Hopper better is seeing where Hopper needs work. We think it's doing a pretty good job for fresh little bunny, but we are also 100% committed to making it better with each update. Hopefully you'll be able to have patience with us (and Hopper) while we do so.
Is Hopper using AI?
Hopper is currently using generative AI features strictly for ingestion, processing, and presenting information for question and answer. What does this mean? Basically, whenever you ask Hopper a question, it will give you an answer based on the information where we've asked it to look. The "AI" technology is how Hopper is able to take information from multiple sources and create user friendly solutions. Hopper isn't designed to learn independently, or to come up with it's own answers. It's just here to help you find articles that VIU IT employees have created, and the information within them.
How 'Intelligent' is Hopper?
It's not! Not at all. Hopper is given a list of webpages to look for answers on, and searches them based on what you ask. It's able to identify key words, and it's able to modify language when presenting instructions. It's not coming up with it's own research in any way.
How does Hopper Learn?
Wanna know a secret? It doesn't. The humans behind it do. when you have conversations with Hopper, we're able to view logs on how it responds. When it gets things wrong, we can sometimes point it to a place where it would have found a solution. If lots of people ask for the same thing, we can write specific instructions for Hopper to follow for the next time it happens. So when Hopper says it's 'Learning', it's really getting updated instructions on a regular basis, from the humans that take care of it.
I'm having trouble submitting a ticket through Hopper!
As mentioned, we're still learning what's working and what's broken, but here's something we've noticed already: If you're signed in with a non-VIU microsoft account, you may run into trouble when trying to create a ticket through Hopper. We're looking into solutions for this, but for now it might be worth retrying using a private or incognito window.
Something went wrong! Who can I tell about this?
You can tell IT! You can either submit directly through Hopper (In B4 "Hopper is what's wrong!") or directly through the IT Knowledge Base. Be sure to put "Hopper Feedback" somewhere in your subject line so we can get the right human eyes on it!