Universities are increasingly looking into self-service systems with intelligent digital agents to supplement or replace labor-intensive services, such as academic counseling. The Open University of Hong Kong has developed an intelligent online system that instantly responds to enquiries about career development, learning modes, program/course choices, study plans, and graduation checks. The intelligent counseling system (the i-Counseling System) was developed under the Center for Innovation initiative funded by the Hong Kong Government in order to provide an effective 24 x 7 academic counseling service to help prospective and current students plan their studies. The online system uses an animated character with multilingual, text-to-speech, and natural language capabilities as a front end for sophisticated search and information retrieval. In this article, the authors describe the design concepts and features of the i-Counseling System. (Contains 3 figures.)