Pork Industry Chatbot: Iowa State University

The Arizona State University Artificial Intelligence Cloud Innovation Center (ASU AI CIC), powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), collaborated with the Iowa Pork Industry Center (IPIC) at Iowa State University to develop an intelligent AI chatbot named "Porki." This solution is designed to provide pork producers, researchers, and students with instant, reliable access to a vast repository of agricultural knowledge. The bilingual chatbot streamlines information discovery from multiple complex sources, delivering accurate, citation-backed answers to support the pork industry.

The Iowa Pork Industry Center manages an extensive knowledge base that includes its primary website and the recently acquired Pork Information Gateway database. This wealth of information—spanning PDFs, videos, webinars, fact sheets, and infographics—was scattered across various platforms. Users, including farmers needing timely advice and students conducting research, struggled to efficiently find specific answers. The sheer volume of content and lack of a unified search tool created a barrier to accessing crucial, research-backed information for decision-making.

The ASU AI CIC team developed a conversational AI prototype that integrates directly into the IPIC website. The solution employs a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture to ensure responses are accurate and grounded in IPIC’s expert-validated content.

The core of the solution is built on a robust, serverless AWS architecture:

• Intelligent Search: The system uses Amazon Bedrock to power its natural language understanding. It creates a unified knowledge base by ingesting and indexing content from the IPIC website and the Pork Information Gateway database.
• Multi-Format Processing: The chatbot handles diverse content types, processing text from websites and PDFs directly, while incorporating services to extract searchable text from multimedia content.
• Conversational Interface: The UI, designed by ASU students, features a simple, web-based chat interface that supports both English and Spanish. Users can ask questions in natural language and receive clear answers with direct citations.
• Scalable Foundation: By using services like AWS Lambda and Amazon S3, the solution is built to be scalable and cost-effective, handling user queries efficiently without managing complex infrastructure.

Porki represents a significant advancement in how agricultural extension services can disseminate information. By providing a single, intelligent point of access to its deep knowledge base, IPIC can more effectively support the pork industry. Farmers and producers can get immediate answers to practical questions, enabling faster, more informed decisions. For researchers and students, the chatbot streamlines the process of finding academic materials, accelerating learning while maintaining academic integrity through source citations.

“The interaction between AWS and ASU students was a very positive experience. The team worked well together with clear, weekly meetings and were attentive to requests made throughout the process.”

Laura Greiner - Director of Iowa Pork Industry Center

The framework developed for the IPIC Pork Chatbot can be adapted for a wide range of organizations that need to make large, complex knowledge bases more accessible.

• Agricultural Extension Programs: Other university extension services can deploy similar chatbots to provide stakeholders with information on different crops or livestock.
• Specialized Research Institutions: Organizations can use this architecture to create search tools for specialized publications and data.
• Customer Support: Companies can adapt the model to power customer service chatbots grounded in technical manuals.