Introducing Ask AI, the reader assistant
aardvark 0.8 ships a native Ask AI panel that answers reader questions from your own docs, with cited sources and metered, dollar-based billing.
With 0.8.0, every aardvark site can ship a native Ask AI assistant. A floating panel sits on every page; readers ask a question in natural language, and the assistant answers from your content, citing the pages it used. Each answer can be rated 👍 / 👎, and readers can attach images, PDFs, or code when a screenshot says it better than a sentence.
There is no third-party widget to embed. The assistant is a first-party feature that calls the aardvark cloud gateway, which proxies the model, meters the spend, and records the conversation for analysis. Enabling it is two lines of config:
ai:
assistant:
enabled: true
plus a spend-capped public gateway key baked in as a build-time environment variable — never a provider key in your repo.
Two design choices matter most. First, grounding: when your corpus fits the model’s context budget, the assistant inlines the whole thing on the first turn and answers with zero fetches; when it doesn’t, it navigates your docs page-by-page, reasoning about which page to read next. Either way the answer comes from what you actually published. Second, honest metering: usage bills in real dollars against a capped allowance, so a public docs site can offer AI answers without signing up for an unbounded bill. Bring your own key, or try it on the bundled, capped allowance.
Behind the panel sits a conversation-analytics dashboard — top questions, coverage gaps, intent tags — so every reader question becomes product insight. You’re reading the docs of a site that runs it: press Cmd+I and ask something.
Read more on the AI assistant page, or see the changelog entry for the release details.