AISH has launched a new artificial intelligence platform aimed at expanding its ability to provide personalized Jewish guidance to users worldwide. The “Rabbi AI” service, accessible at ai.aish.com, represents the organization’s developing solution to meeting the growing demand for guidance and answering questions related to Judaism and Jewish practice. Noah Levin, Chief Product & Marketing Officer for AISH, explained that the program arose from the organization’s current programs lack of ability to fulfill the rising demand of Jews looking for guidance and our desire to ensure that everyone that comes has an outlet to ask question. “People are coming to aish.com and engaging with our online chat. Our chat is currently staffed by three rabbis who live in different parts of the world and who respond to queries from Jews across the globe 24/6. The online chat system works to provide Jews who are looking for a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, personal guidance, or knowledge about Judaism,” Levin said. “The challenge being that we’ve often seen the demand is far more than we can supply.” Three months ago, the team developed a specialized language model incorporating AISH’s extensive online curriculum and knowledge base, as well as uploading and transcribing core philosophical offline content, including lectures and books. “We began to test AISH’s Rabbi AI on people within the organization, on our branch staff around the world, rabbis, students, and we refined it,” Levin stated. “People were very impressed that it reflects, both pedagogically in terms of how it answers the questions, and also philosophically, what AISH believes at its heart as an organization.” The platform offers multilingual capabilities, understanding questions in almost any language while primarily responding in English. Spanish speakers will receive responses in Spanish, with plans to expand language support in the future. Rabbi Steven Burg, CEO of AISH, emphasized the technology’s importance in their mission: ” “Rabbi AI enables us to provide knowledge, education, and Jewish wisdom at scale to tens of thousands of people seeking guidance around the world. This technology helps us meet people where they are with authentic Jewish teachings.” Rabbi Nechemiah Coopersmith, who has been involved with AISH for over 40 years and the Chief Editor of AISH.com since its inception 25 years ago, was chosen to be the face of the project and is very excited about the potential upscale of service. “The platform is a culmination of decades of Jewish wisdom shared on Aish.com and throughout the AISH organization,” Rabbi Coopersmith said. “While once skeptical of the quality of answers given by AI, the ability of AI has developed to such a degree that the responses given now by Rabbi AI are accurate, authentic, relatable, and sensitive. What the team has developed here is nothing short of breathtaking.” The system maintains human oversight, with the AI capable of flagging conversations that require rabbinical intervention for users who request it, those looking for guidance from a human rabbi, or for conversations that expand beyond the scope of the AI’s ability to respond. While user identities remain anonymized, human rabbis can view conversation contexts when invited to participate. “We have an internal system operating on the backend to make sure we don’t know who this person is so that their identity is protected and everything is anonymous, unless the person […]  | Read More The Yeshiva World