Check how our partners use ASK!
Libraries
Chat about books, films, etc.
- clarify requests by asking follow-up questions
- sort results and answer in tables (e.g., “Travel guides on Italy—sorted by year—with short summaries”)
- support all major languages
- adapt its tone (serious for researchers, playful for kids)
- handle practical questions too (yes, even “Where’s the cafeteria?”)
THE ASSOCIATION OF PUBLIC LIBRARIES IN BERLIN (VÖBB)
VÖBB (“Verbund der öffentlichen Bibliotheken Berlins”) represents 84 libraries in Berlin with 468,588 library card holders (2024).
For Berlin’s recommendation bot, we imported data for about 4 million media items (books, films, music, etc.). The bot went live in June 2024, making it the first AI Recommendation-Bot used in day-to-day public library service. We worked closely with VÖBB staff to shape features and prompts that fit real library needs.
With months (and soon years) of live usage, we’re among the few teams running AI bots for a broad public audience—outside the lab, in the wild.
Find the Bot live on the website of VÖBB (bottom right).
Talk to VÖBB:
Institutions
Conversational Research
In academia, our AI-Chatbots provide 24/7 access to research materials, citation help, and study resources. While classic search is great for precision, a chatbot helps you:
- expand and specify a topic and make concrete suggestions for deepening research strategy
- access and interrogate large amounts of text - including reference to sources for comprehensive transparency
- provide comprehensive information on study regulations, admission requirements or just the location of the next lecture
- create concise summaries of documents
- if a search fails, suggest similar hits, alternative spellings or comparable authors
- create reading lists or comparative text analysis
TH KÖLN – UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED SCIENCES
TH Köln offers access to the ASK recommendation bot for assistance with searching its media collection in two environments:
- the university library website
- the library catalogue (integrated via DigiBib)
The chatbot’s conversational format makes it easier for beginners to get started with literature research, thus complementing the search functions of the traditional library catalogue.
TH Köln makes intensive use of our backend. It has created several ASK bots to test different language models (e.g. various ChatGPT models, Mistral), prompting approaches and conversation strategies. Adjustments have been made to the system prompts in order to better meet the user expectations of an academic library.
TH Köln tracks and analyses usage via the statistics backend.
Talk to Kai:
UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DEL URUGUAY
We collaborate with UCU as our first partner outside Europe.
UCU uses the ASK Recommendation-Bot. The Bot helps students by allowing conversational research based on all the media in the UCU library. We imported all available metadata, set up regular updates for new acquisitions and deletions.
Significant customizations of our prompt-set were also made to meet the specific requirements of our first Latin American library partner. And yes – ASK works very well in Spanish (and all other major languages of the world), too.
For UCU we created an integration for Koha and initial steps toward EBSCO integration.
¡Bárbaro!
Talk to UCU:
Document Retrieval
Imagine an archive with a vast collection of material about a person: you provide text files or PDFs, and—whoosh—you can “talk” with her or him. You can summarize old newspapers, chat with a collection of letters or ask old restaurant menus what the most popular Christmas dish was during the Roaring 20s. Any collection of archival content thus becomes accessible for questioning.
We built a prototype using numerous newspaper articles from the 1920s. You can ask questions like “Which club won the football championship in 1924 in Hesse?”
The bot answers and cites the exact article used. We deliver the sources which were generated in creating the response (document, page in the document). Researches can click on the link, open the document and verify the answer.
Our Document Bot is especially strong when OCR results are imperfect and parts of the text are unreadable. Because it works from meaning rather than keywords, it can often infer missing fragments.
Link to our archive prototype SOON.
Libraries
Inspire curiosity!
An AI-Bot can “talk” with children. It can say “Hi” at eye level, it can chat about what a child or a teenager might want to read, watch or listen to.
And the children find in a bot a companion that they know how to use: A school librarian told us that children don’t use the term “to Google” anymore, since they are already expecting AI-generated answers.
TAUNUSSTEIN CHILDREN LIBRARY (coming soon!)
This bot is used by… well, children.
For Taunusstein, we are using emojis freely (strictly prohibited in more serious bots 😉), addressing very specific data-protection requirements.
We included text-to-speech as well as cover images for books, comics, etc.
(Link coming soon)
Institutions
talk about anything and everything
AI is about doing things that weren’t possible before— like linking large amounts of data across formats with surprisingly little effort.
Example: We built a prototype combining a museum collection with the museum library: Admire a marble statue of Hercules, and the bot can recommend a book on Hellenism—available on the 3rd floor.
In essence you can feed the ASK with any data you have and then talk about it. Of course you could do that with NotebookLM and other providers, too, but we provide transparency and full control on the data including a free choice of LLMs.
GERMAN NATIONAL LIBRARY (coming soon!)
The German National Library uses our Info Bot to answer service questions like:
- “Where can I borrow headphones?”
- Where do I park my bicycle?
- When are you open?
With locations in Frankfurt and Leipzig, the bot can ask which site the question is about—so the answer is correct the first time.
(Link coming soon)
Beyond our standard bots, we support institutions with tailored solutions. We hold regular courses to educate library staff in AI (please also check our webinars).
We’ve been running public-facing AI bots for hundreds of thousands of users since March 2024. Put that experience to work.
We offer consultancy on designing, evaluating, and rolling out chatbots for libraries, archives, and public institutions—including data protection and the EU AI Act.
Just contact us.