Quick Way to Build a Campus IT Helpdesk Chatbot with Tencent EdgeOne Makers

Andi Irham M — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 06:27:35 +0000

TL;DR: Imagine a campus IT helpdesk room free from the constant ringing of phones and queues of panicked students over forgotten passwords or WiFi issues. This article invites you to explore how Tencent EdgeOne Makers turns operational chaos into AI-powered efficiency. Without the hassle of building complex infrastructure from scratch, discover the secret behind 4 practical steps—from setting up a knowledge base to deployment—ready to turn your smart chatbot into a 24/7 savior for the academic community!

Introduction: Operational Challenges for Campus IT Staff

At the beginning of each semester and during daily operations, university IT teams and staff are often faced with a high volume of repetitive workloads. Basic technical questions and issues from students and the academic community repeatedly flood the helpdesk, such as:

Authentication Issues: Difficulty accessing or forgotten passwords for academic portals/SIAKAD.
Connectivity: Connection and authentication issues with campus WiFi networks.
Account Services: Institutional email activation guides and access to learning management systems (LMS).
Computer Facilities: Procedures for requesting device or computer lab facility loans.

This high volume of repetitive requests causes IT staff to spend significant time responding to the same questions, leaving limited time for handling more critical infrastructure issues and campus technology innovation.

Solution: Introducing Tencent EdgeOne Makers

To address this challenge, a responsive and easy-to-implement smart automation solution is needed. Tencent EdgeOne Makers comes as an integrated AI platform that enables institutions and campuses to build AI agents practically, quickly, and easily without having to build server or AI infrastructure from scratch.

By leveraging edge computing capabilities and the low-code/no-code architecture of Tencent EdgeOne Makers, campus IT units can compile a knowledge base, configure prompts, and deploy smart chatbots to various campus communication channels in just a few simple steps.

Step 1: Preparation and Account Registration

This guide is compiled based on real-world experience building an application from an empty folder, so you can understand the complete development flow from start to finish.
Before getting started, make sure you have prepared the following prerequisites:

Node.js is already installed on your computer.
A Tencent Cloud / EdgeOne account (You can quickly sign up using a Google account).
EdgeOne CLI installed globally. This entire project can be run on the free tier, as EdgeOne Makers provides 500,000 free tokens, which is plenty for testing and development purposes.

Once the prerequisites are met, follow these initial account registration and configuration steps:

Log in to the main Tencent EdgeOne Makers dashboard.
Create a new project specifically for "Campus IT Helpdesk".
Set access limits and authorization for the IT team members who will manage the project.

Step 2: Building the Project

Here, we use Antigravity to build the project more easily. If you do not have the Antigravity application or Antigravity CLI installed yet, install it with the following command:

irm https://antigravity.google/cli/install.ps1 | iex
Then run the agy command, and a display like this will appear:
And type goals like this: “/goal I want to create a campus IT service chatbot that can respond to repetitive issues from the academic community regarding running information systems, such as campus Wi-Fi issues, staff issues, student issues, and others. The dependencies and platform used must be Tencent EdgeOne Makers” then press enter.
Let the agent make decisions in creating the chatbot:

Step 3: Testing

The project to be built is usually a Next.js web application. We can ask Antigravity to run the project by executing the npm run dev command, but before that, the agent will usually ask us to fill in the LLM model API key manually.
Open the .env file in your project.
Add an available AI model (e.g., @makers/deepseek-v4-flash) and the Tencent EdgeOne Makers API Key.
Guide to Getting a Tencent EdgeOne Makers API Key:
- Log in to the Tencent EdgeOne Makers Console (https://pages.edgeone.ai/).
- On the dashboard, navigate to the AI Gateway / Makers Management menu.
- Select API Keys / Access Management.
- Click the Create API Key button to generate a new API key.
Copy the created API key, then add it to the .env file under the AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY variable. Make sure to also set AI_GATEWAY_BASE_URL (https://ai-gateway.edgeone.link/v1) and AI_MODEL_ID (@makers/deepseek-v4-flash).
Then run the project and success!

Step 4: Deploy Chatbot to Tencent EdgeOne Makers

Push the code to your Git repository (the local git repository has been initialized & committed).
Log in to the Tencent EdgeOne Makers Console (https://pages.edgeone.ai/).
Select Import Git Repository and point to your repository (EdgeOne Makers will automatically read edgeone.json).
Enter environment variables in the EdgeOne console such as AI_GATEWAY_BASE_URL, AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY, and AI_MODEL_ID.
Click Deploy.

Conclusion

By leveraging Tencent EdgeOne Makers, higher education institutions can transform IT helpdesk services from time-consuming manual processes into fast, accurate, and efficient AI-powered self-service. IT staff can now focus on core infrastructure efficiency, while students receive instant answers anytime, anywhere.

DEV Community: Andi Irham M