Search better in your community with Ask AI

[nat (Natalie T)]

After some weeks of experimenting, we are now pleased to share with you our new “Ask AI”, right within your community.

“Ask AI” helps your community users get to the answers they want faster by supporting natural language queries, and follow up questions. It also works side-by-side with the existing indexed search.

In cases where there are no good results, we prompt your users with a “Create topic” call to action that opens the composer with an appropriate topic title and category using the query.

How it works

We pass user queries sent through “Ask AI” to a ‘rewriter’ that returns us two better queries, one for traditional keyword search and another for semantic search that uses embeddings. The two searches are run (fast), tallied, then given to a ‘synthesiser’ to give the best results to the user.

If a user would like to follow up their query, the follow-up agent (defaults to Forum Helper) will take over from there.

For all hosted sites these are available to you for free with our hosted models. For self-hosters you would have to make sure you have embeddings set up as well.

Setup

For all brand new hosted sites, “Ask AI” is enabled by default.

For existing hosted sites

• turn it on by going to your AI Features page (/admin/plugins/discourse-ai/ai-features) and looking for “Search”.
• Click in to “Settings” and enable. You also get to choose the default experience
  • (scroll through settings and variances):
  • Admins with “AI Discovery” enabled will see it in the same “Search” section. “AI Discovery” is not compatible with the new “Ask AI”, and is being phased out.

Here is a proper list of settings you need enabled, besides AI plugin and a working model:

• The main: ai_ask_ai_enabled
• The “Embeddings” feature in AI Features page is enabled (hosted customers - no worries ) - this drives semantic search
  • As of 2026-09-08T16:00:00Z this is now not mandatory, but highly recommended. If “Embeddings” AI feature is not enabled, Ask AI will be driven solely by keyword search, and not have the accompanying semantic search functionality.
• The “Bot” feature in the AI Features page is enabled - this drives the follow up feature
  • ai_bot_allowed_groups should match the ai_ask_ai_allowed_groups
  • the default Forum Helper agent (/admin/plugins/discourse-ai/ai-agents/-1/edit) should be enabled and allow personal messages

Try it out

We’ve enabled the feature on meta for a few weeks now, and believe it can improve the search experience in your community, especially those with a rich archive of discussions.

Turn it on and let us know where it helped, where it missed a useful discussion, and whether the answer gave you enough context.

[jaroslav.kovar]

Cool feature. I enabled it for our B&R Community. Just a question: is there any additional cost related to it, since it can lead to more AI usage?

[nat (Natalie T)]

Hey @jaroslav.kovar thanks for asking - yes there will be incurred token cost.

You can monitor usage here:

• /admin/plugins/discourse-ai/ai-usage?feature=ask_ai&period=week

and adjust who you would like the feature to be exposed to, e.g. TL0 (all users) or maybe a more restricted TL1.

[satonotdead]

It is beautiful, thanks for building it!

I wonder if there’s a way to increase to 3 or 4 the boxes displayed by the new initial search result from Ask AI? Or is it something automatic that I haven’t discovered yet?

For now, I only see two boxes, and I think some answers deserve 3 or 4 as a first general overview.

Found it on AI ask AI related count admin setting

[nat (Natalie T)]

Nice. Do also note it’s a ‘max’ count, so if the agent decides there’s only one or two, it will just do so.

[EricGT]

Early feedback using on a large hosted forum.

• Make the prompt input field larger.

  I entered a fairly detailed prompt, but the search text box makes it difficult to review or edit the full prompt before submitting it.

  This is the search/prompt as shown in the search text box:

This is the full prompt after it was submitted:

For AI search, where prompts may naturally be longer and more expressive than traditional keyword searches, a larger or expandable input area would be useful.

---

• Allow the Show all matching topics results to be sorted by the column headers: Replies, Views, and Activity.

In this case, I knew the exact topic I was looking for and also knew that it was a popular topic. After getting the Show all matching topics results, I still had to manually scan the Views column to find the topic with the high view count that was still open.

Being able to click Replies, Views, or Activity to sort the result set would make the AI search results much easier to narrow down after the initial semantic search has done its job.

[nat (Natalie T)]

@EricGT

• Make the prompt input field larger.

  I entered a fairly detailed prompt

Hmm in this case I would actually say that Ask AI isn’t the correct feature, but something like https://ask.discourse.com/discourse-ai/ai-bot/conversations?agent=discourse-helper (full-page) would prove to be better instead.

We can separately consider moving the user to a dedicated page once they go beyond a certain number of characters, but it’s unlikely we’ll expand the textbox beyond a single line.

@EricGT

• sorted by the column headers: Replies, Views, and Activity.

Cool, we can consider that.

[EricGT]

@nat

Hmm in this case I would actually say that Ask AI isn’t the correct feature, but something like https://ask.discourse.com/discourse-ai/ai-bot/conversations?agent=discourse-helper (full-page) would prove to be better instead.

My take is that while ask.discourse.com cannot answer the same search questions because it does not have access to the community’s content, it does provide a useful example of the framework—both in the UI and, presumably, the underlying implementation—for supporting a much larger prompt input.

@nat

something like

Of course, something like leaves us hanging a bit on what that might eventually mean. It feels like waiting for the first episode of the next season of a show.

Now that Discourse search, when configured with Ask AI, can handle questions of this kind, I would rather see the search interface grow to accommodate that capability than have it unnecessarily constrained.

In all honesty, I have tended to avoid Discourse search because I often found it more frustrating than useful. With Ask AI, though, it is starting to show real promise, and I would hate to see the input UI limit what the feature itself can do.

---

In a way, this reminds me of the challenge Google faced in evolving a search interface designed around a few keywords into something that also needs to accommodate conversational AI queries.

[nat (Natalie T)]

@EricGT

My take is that while ask.discourse.com cannot answer the same search questions because it does not have access to the community’s content

The ask.discourse.com was just an example, you can enable the same thing on your community too, it’s just the AI Bot feature. We also have it available on meta at https://meta.discourse.org/discourse-ai/ai-bot/conversations though probably only for some users.

We do take feedback seriously though, and while folks tend not to see it, there’s a lot of work behind the scenes.

[EricGT]

@nat

you can enable the same thing on your community too

Thanks!

It is enabled, and I have access. Now I am starting to sound like Data from Star Trek.

https://community.openai.com/discourse-ai/ai-bot/conversations?agent=forum-helper&llm=gpt-56-medium

What I am not sure about is how many users on that forum—or on other forums—would also have access to that page.

As a quick improvement, perhaps the search/Ask AI page could provide a link to the AI Bot conversations page, or otherwise make that option more discoverable. Something like Continue in AI Bot might make the relationship between the two interfaces clearer.

---

In doing some experimenting with Discourse AI:

The list of available agents can be a bit overwhelming. Having followed some of the earlier evolution of Discourse AI, I have at least some idea what they are for. Coming to this for the first time, though, I think I would find the choices difficult to evaluate.

I tried the same prompt with two agents:

• Forum Helper — because it is described as general purpose.
• Discover — because it was the default agent.

As you noted, the UI and workflow are much better suited to entering a substantial prompt.

The result from Discover was a single paragraph with a few links and, for this particular prompt, did not give me much of value.

The result from Forum Helper, however, was several paragraphs and was worth reading and following up on. It appeared to do considerably more investigation of the internet rather than simply returning a few related topics.

That makes me wonder whether the choice of agent should either be more obvious to the user or perhaps be selected automatically based on what the user is trying to do.

---

That brings me to another possible issue farther down the road.

When I ask ChatGPT to search https://community.openai.com/ from outside the forum, I have occasionally received a response indicating that the available number of requests for the day has been reached.

I do not yet know whether that limit originates with Discourse, an intermediary, or the external retrieval system, so I do not want to draw a conclusion from it.

The next time I encounter it, I will try to remember to capture the exact message and post it here. It may be useful when considering how external AI systems interact with a Discourse site’s public content.

[nat (Natalie T)]

@EricGT

As a quick improvement, perhaps the search/Ask AI page could provide a link to the AI Bot conversations page, or otherwise make that option more discoverable. Something like Continue in AI Bot

This is a feature covered above, it’s good that you’re asking so we can highlight it further -

@nat

@nat

Here is a proper list of settings you need enabled, besides AI plugin and a working model:

• …
• The “Bot” feature in the AI Features page is enabled - this drives the follow up feature
  • ai_bot_allowed_groups should match the ai_ask_ai_allowed_groups
  • the default Forum Helper agent (/admin/plugins/discourse-ai/ai-agents/-1/edit) should be enabled and allow personal messages

The “Ask” button near the bottom of the modal leads to the AI Bot feature. It is a separate AI Feature itself (predates the “Ask AI” feature) and requires some configuring.

---

@EricGT

When I ask ChatGPT to search https://community.openai.com/ from outside the forum, I have occasionally received a response indicating that the available number of requests for the day has been reached.

There could be some rate limits involved. Best to cover this within that community itself so the admins there can address it.

[EricGT]

@nat

The “Ask” button near the bottom of the modal leads to the AI Bot feature.

Great feature. I do think it could be made a little more discoverable, though, so it is less likely to be overlooked or misunderstood. I know I missed what Ask was intended to do.

Perhaps a tooltip on hover, or a small help/info icon next to Ask, could briefly explain that it opens the AI Bot feature.

Another possibility would be slightly more descriptive button text, such as Ask AI, which might make the purpose clear without requiring any additional interaction.

[EricGT]

Another use case I expected to work, but it did not.

For more than a year, I have been redirecting OpenAI Codex bug reports from the forum to GitHub when I can identify a closely related open issue.

Today, a Codex issue was posted, and I followed my usual workflow. Using ChatGPT, I was able to identify a valid, closely related open Codex GitHub issue.

I then tried essentially the same prompt using Discourse search, except instead of providing a link to the specific forum topic, I selected “This topic.”

The result was:

I then tried “AI”:

I understand that the first search is intended to limit results to topics within the forum. However, once users become accustomed to using “Ask” for broader, AI-assisted queries, the distinction between the two behaviors may not be obvious.

[Moin]

@EricGT

selected “This topic.”

The result was:

This seems expected. You have searched for the text you entered within the Discourse topic you were currently looking at. That is not the Ask AI feature but the classic search limited to the ID of the current topic. It’s not about limiting search to topics within the forum.

And even with Ask AI, you only search within the forum, not elsewhere about content in the forum. That’s what you would do with an ai-bot. Ask-ai is about better search within the community.

[nat (Natalie T)]

@EricGT

I know I missed what Ask was intended to do

In an earlier iteration, the follow up box was not pre-filled and had a “Ask a follow-up” placeholder. Perhaps that could work, unsure. We’ll wait for more feedback.

@EricGT

Today, a Codex issue was posted, and I followed my usual workflow. Using ChatGPT, I was able to identify a valid, closely related open Codex GitHub issue.

I then tried essentially the same prompt using Discourse search, except instead of providing a link to the specific forum topic, I selected “This topic.”

The result was:

I then tried “AI”:

I understand that the first search is intended to limit results to topics within the forum. However, once users become accustomed to using “Ask” for broader, AI-assisted queries, the distinction between the two behaviors may not be obvious.

I think I am unsure about the wording of the feedback here (a bit like Moin): do you want to use Ask AI only within a topic, or do you want Ask AI to work with context outside the forum? It is not meant to help with the latter.

[Moin]

Is it possible to have classic search as a default? It’s quite annoying that I can no longer use the enter button on my tablet’s keyboard for this. Shift Enter might work on laptops, but on my tablet I cannot use that.

Especially when adding something to my search term for better results, I would like to keep the current search type I had just selected.
Example: I want to search for AI in this topic, so I type ai and use the “in this topic” button. Then I might notice that this is not specific enough and add a second word. Now I need to click “in this topic” again otherwise Discourse decides I now want to do an AI search. At least in this case it could assume I still want the same search I just did

---

Found the toggle in full screen search. I didn’t notice the option was in every search modal because I see this without scrolling within the modal and didn’t expect there was something missing

[nat (Natalie T)]

@Moin

Is it possible to have classic search as a default?

…

Found the toggle in full screen search.

Yes, the first screenshot in OP has a toggle at the bottom to do that

[Moin]

And my screenshot does not. It was challenging to notice I need to scroll. It’s easier if something is cut then if just something is missing. So I assumed the toggle might have been moved

[nat (Natalie T)]

The setting shown there is also tied to your user preferences: https://meta.discourse.org/my/preferences/interface

[Moin]

I still feel that selecting “in this topic” stayed after entering more words. Now that is lost and I am back to searching all posts