AI in practice: the Winweb chatbot

Gen-AI, short for Generative Artificial Intelligence, is a term that is currently on everyone's lips in the tech world. This technology marks a turning point in how we understand and use digital assistance. A prime example of Gen-AI in practice is ChatGPT, which is already integrated into many people's daily lives. Winweb recognized its potential for the winweb-food software solution and quickly sought the right partners to give its customers access to this technology. From now on, every one of our customers will have an advanced chatbot at their side. This intelligent assistant is trained to answer questions about Winweb, drawing information from the WinwebWiki and the winweb-food help system.

Thanks to our successful collaboration with our partner DataStax we have implemented a chatbot based on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology. This allows our AI to generate answers to complex queries by selectively searching a wide range of information sources, resulting in significantly more relevant and accurate responses. This technology has enormous potential and opens up new possibilities for interaction between customers and our service.

First, content from various sources, such as our WinwebWiki and the winweb-food help system, is converted into so-called embeddings. This technical method makes it possible to convert text into dense vectors, which are then stored in a specialized Datastax Astra vector database. AstraDB enables complex, context-sensitive searches in large datasets and stands out for its ability to deliver scalability and performance for generative AI applications without requiring developers to contend with significant operational overhead. This database is accessed via a custom service developed using Python, Flask and Docker, which can scale as a cloud service depending on the volume of requests. This service acts as an interface that receives requests from Winweb apps or winweb-food, searches the vector database for the corresponding embeddings and returns the most relevant documents in real time. The artificial intelligence then has access to all relevant documents that are useful for answering the user’s query.

Winweb and DataStax are committed to the highest data protection standards and ensure the security of customer data through up-to-date encryption standards and by operating all servers within the European Union. This ensures that all data processing activities are subject to the EU's strict data protection regulations, which are among the most robust in the world.

We warmly invite you to join us on this exciting journey. Are there any specific data sources or systems in your company that you would like to connect to your personal chatbot? Do you have any specific requirements or requests? We welcome your ideas and suggestions as we continue to develop our service together.

Contact us directly to learn more about how Winweb and our innovative AI approaches can support your business. Together, we can push the boundaries of what is possible.