Student Companion AI

One AI companion, every university's own knowledge.

Student Companion AI is a multi-tenant Progressive Web App that gives each university its own AI assistant — grounded in that university's handbook, policies, and records, not a generic answer from the open web. A student's university is resolved automatically from their verified email domain; no manual "pick your school" step, no cross-tenant data leakage, one login for every campus on the platform.

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Why this exists

Every university has the same problem: policies, deadlines, and department contacts live scattered across PDFs, portals, and word-of-mouth. Students either dig for answers or wait for office hours. Student Companion AI closes that gap — instant, sourced answers from the institution's own materials, available at 2pm or 2am.

What makes it a platform rather than a single chatbot:

• True multi-tenancy. Each university gets its own isolated knowledge base, its own admin team, and its own curators — with no code changes and no engineering ticket required to onboard a new school.
• Domain-based identity. A student's university is resolved from their verified email domain (@youruni.edu → the right tenant, automatically).
• Self-service administration. University admins manage their own staff accounts, office-hours curators, and plan tier from a real dashboard — not a spreadsheet request to engineering.

What it looks like

Features

Area	What it does
Grounded AI chat	Retrieval-augmented answers, cited from the student's own university's knowledge base — streamed, with automatic non-streaming fallback.
Multi-tenant identity	Firebase authentication with server-verified email-domain routing; each organization's data is isolated at the retrieval and database layer.
Admin dashboard	Organization admins manage their own staff, curators, and office-hours listings; platform admins manage the roster of onboarded universities and plan tiers.
Office hours	Real, bookable curator office-hours listings per organization — replacing what used to be a hidden, hardcoded widget.
Opportunities & News	Scholarships, internships, programs, and campus updates surfaced per organization.
Document tools	Upload and manage source documents that feed each organization's knowledge base.
Analytics & feedback	Admin-facing dashboards for usage, student feedback, and suggestions.
Installable PWA	Works like a native app on a phone — offline-friendly shell, home-screen install, push-ready.

How a question becomes an answer

Student asks a question
        │
        ▼
Frontend (this repo) — resolves the student's organization from their
        │              verified email domain, sends the question with auth
        ▼
Backend (FastAPI, Hugging Face Space) — embeds the question and runs a
        │              vector search against that organization's own
        │              ChromaDB collection (never another tenant's)
        ▼
Relevant, sourced context is retrieved and stitched into a grounded prompt
        │
        ▼
The model answers from that context — and says "I don't know, here's
        │              where to look" rather than inventing an answer
        ▼
Answer streams back to the student, cited

Tech stack

Layer	Technology
Framework	React 18 + TypeScript
Build tool	Vite 5
UI	Tailwind CSS + shadcn/ui (Radix primitives)
Auth	Firebase Authentication (client) + Firebase Admin (server-verified)
Backend	FastAPI on a Hugging Face Space (separate repository)
Retrieval	ChromaDB — one isolated collection per organization
Relational data	Aurora PostgreSQL (AWS RDS Serverless v2)
Hosting	Vercel

Getting started

Prerequisites

• Node.js 18+
• A Firebase project (for auth)

Install

npm install

Configure environment

cp .env.example .env

Variable	Description
VITE_API_URL	Backend base URL (Hugging Face Space or localhost)
VITE_FIREBASE_API_KEY	Firebase web API key (restrict by HTTP referrer)
VITE_FIREBASE_AUTH_DOMAIN	Firebase auth domain
VITE_FIREBASE_PROJECT_ID	Firebase project ID
VITE_FIREBASE_STORAGE_BUCKET	Firebase storage bucket
VITE_FIREBASE_MESSAGING_SENDER_ID	Firebase messaging sender ID
VITE_FIREBASE_APP_ID	Firebase app ID

Note: .env is gitignored and must never be committed. Admin identity is decided server-side by the backend, never in the client bundle — there is intentionally no admin email list here.

Run

npm run dev        # start the dev server on http://localhost:3000
npm run build      # production build to dist/
npm run preview    # preview the production build
npm run lint       # lint the codebase

Project structure

src/
├── components/     UI components (chat, admin, layout, shadcn/ui primitives)
├── config/         API base URL, auth headers, fetch helpers
├── contexts/       React context providers (auth, etc.)
├── hooks/          Custom React hooks
├── lib/            Firebase init and shared utilities
├── pages/          Route pages — landing, auth, chat, admin, office hours, …
├── services/       Backend API clients (aiService, opportunitiesService, …)
├── types/          Shared TypeScript types
└── utils/          Helpers

mobile/             React Native (Expo) companion app

Deployment

The app is deployed on Vercel from this repository's main branch.

• Production branch: main
• Build command: npm run build
• Output directory: dist
• SPA routing is handled by the rewrite in vercel.json.

Set VITE_API_URL and the VITE_FIREBASE_* variables in the Vercel project's Environment Variables (Production scope). A push to main triggers a production build automatically.

License

Proprietary. All rights reserved unless stated otherwise.