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.
- (scroll through settings and variances):
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 - The “Bot” feature in the AI Features page is enabled - this drives the follow up feature
ai_bot_allowed_groupsshould match theai_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.