spanish-academy — week of 2026-06-15

The biggest engineering week of the project. The goal was an AI chat assistant that does more than answer FAQs — one that can actually move a prospect toward enrolling.

I built the assistant on a small AI brain that, in a single turn, can answer from a curated knowledge base, check real class availability, book a demo class, or hand off to a human advisor. It collects the visitor’s name, email and phone before booking, splits availability into clean date options, resolves relative dates like “tomorrow” itself, and creates the booking and the lead record in the school’s CRM. It’s deliberately brief and WhatsApp-friendly, replies in the visitor’s language (English, Spanish or Chinese), and keeps each conversation’s state isolated so nothing leaks between chats. It’s verified, tested, and gracefully handles the awkward cases — no availability on a given day, an advisor who’s offline, a contact detail that needs correcting.

Alongside the bot I finished bringing the remaining lead forms in-house — a self-hosted placement-exam lead-and-certificate flow and a children’s-program signup wizard — and redesigned the notification emails to render reliably across phones and mail clients.