Kara Herd, a graduate student at Georgia State University in Atlanta, helps script the campus chatbot Pounce, the voice of the furry blue panther mascot. Speaking recently from the sofa of her apartment, Ms. Herd was testing how Pounce answered those expressing trouble logging into iCollege, the campus online learning platform.

“It was sending everyone to tech support,” said Ms. Herd. “Before this pandemic, that was an appropriate answer because you could always go to class. Now you have to tweak the knowledge,” so students also contact their professor, she said.

Like many crafting chatbot responses, Ms. Herd uses an upbeat tone. She channels “the way I would talk to my friends. I would use some emojis, I would put in exclamations.” (While “very partial to the hand emoji,” she said, “it doesn’t work with Covid-19.”)

There is a line scriptwriters walk, said Katie Carroll, who manages the chatbot Cowboy Joe, the Shetland pony mascot at the University of Wyoming. “We’ll joke around with students” but avoid slang. There is friendliness, “but still that level of professionalism.”

Ms. Carroll said the school did not hide that Cowboy Joe was an A.I.-fueled “robo-pony that loved questions.” Nor did it keep students from expressing thanks, “you made me feel super welcomed,” or affection, even “I love you.”

To campus leaders across the country who struggle to reach a generation that shuns official websites and mass emails, chatbots “cut through the clutter,” as one put it, because they feel more personal. For 99 percent of queries, the bot responds in 6 to 10 seconds. (If it lacks an answer, it offers to “check with a human and get back to you.”)

“That means they can hold conversations,” said Timothy Renick, senior vice president for student success and professor of religious studies at Georgia State. That was key to helping Mr. Renick solve a problem: In 2015, he noticed more than 300 students who committed to the university did not show up in the fall, a phenomenon known as “summer melt.” Many were low-income first-generation students who, he found, “did not attend any college; they ended up nowhere.”