Arbor's AI Features

Seamlessly built into your MIS, Arbor AI can turn your requests into actions and make your everyday tasks even easier. As your collaborator and assistant, Arbor's AI features appear right where you need them, freeing up your time for tasks only you can handle. This guide outlines each feature, explains its function, and offers resources for further exploration of these tools.

Ask Arbor

Ask Arbor is our flagship AI feature. It is your built-in AI assistant, designed to work alongside the data you rely on every day. It understands your role, your school, and what you are trying to achieve to give you the insight you need, right when you need it.

Access the assistant on a slide-over from any page of your MIS by clicking the 'Ask Arbor' button in the top-right corner.

Ask Arbor can help you:

• Work in your context: Get personalised responses based on the page you are currently viewing.

• Quickly find staff and student information: No need to search or click through multiple menus to find a birthday, a timetable, or an attendance figure.

• Pinpoint patterns: Get behaviour insights across students, groups, or terms, and drill into the underlying data to uncover trends.

• Take action right away: Send customised communications or find and book free rooms directly within the chatbot.

Find our detailed exploration of this feature here: gugioug

Suggest Email and Suggest SMS

The Suggest Email and Suggest SMS functionalities allow you to tell Arbor what you want to write about, choose a tone of voice and a language, and Arbor will suggest a draft for you. You are free to edit the contents of the email or SMS in the same way as you would when sending something that you had written. The Suggest Communications tool is even able to draft messages in multiple languages for you!

Suggest Student Summary

The Student Summary feature allows you to create an overview of a student using the data recorded in Arbor for the student, such as attendance, behaviour, and academic performance. The summary also provides actionable insights on how to address areas where the student is or is not performing as expected. 

Smart Reports

Smart Reports are pre-built, AI-powered templates designed to instantly compile massive amounts of statutory and whole-school data into one view.

Suggest a Formula

Suggest a formula that allows you to describe what you need to calculate in your Custom Report, and Arbor will create the formula for you and display the results as a column. 

Simply click the Suggest Formula button on the slideover when adding an advanced calculated field to a custom report and describe what you need your formula to do; Arbor AI will take care of the rest and write a formula for you!

For example, you may ask Arbor AI to suggest a formula that highlights students of concern based on their predicted versus actual and baseline marks for an assessment.

Auto Absence (Paid Add-on)

Arbor's Auto Absence feature automatically creates pending absence notes from your parent or guardian's voicemails, saving your attendance officers and office staff tons of time otherwise spent logging and processing student absences to free up this time to focus on more important things.

Note: Auto Absence is an add-on to your Arbor MIS subscription and is not covered by your monthly AI credit allowance.

Find our detailed exploration of this feature, including an extensive FAQ, setup and user guide, here.

FAQs

Do we have to pay anything extra to use Arbor's AI features?

Arbor AI features are a little different to regular Arbor features, because they're powered by AI credits behind the scenes. We believe every school should benefit from our time-saving AI features, so we give all schools a monthly free allowance of AI credits to use on standard AI features like Ask Arbor, Suggest Comms, and Student Summary (ex. Auto Absence).

If your school reaches the free limit, access to our AI features simply pauses until credits are replenished so that you never incur any surprise costs or unwanted overages. To continue using the features, you can also choose to top up your credits with a one-off AI Subscription to keep using Arbor AI without interruption. For more details, see Arbor AI Subscription and Monthly Free Allowance.

The exception to this is non-standard AI features like Auto Absence, which is AI-powered but does not rely on AI credits. These features are purchased through a standalone add-on and are always paid.