The Apologist Project is a nonprofit which will feature a conversational AI and social platform for Christian apologetics. Today, we are pleased to announce that Apologist Agent and Apologist Beacon are now in beta. Backing both products is our proprietary LLM, code-named “Aquinas.”
We signed a team up to participate in Gloo’s AI & the Church Hackathon to accelerate development, and we’re extremely pleased with the results.
We hope that our products can serve as evangelistic tools for non-believers seeking spiritual truth, as well as a way for believers to sharpen their knowledge when it comes to addressing difficult questions posed to their faith.
First, we used AI-driven OCR correction techniques to prepare a corpus of Bible translations and public domain Christian theological works that have stood the test of time. Then, using the open-source Llama 2 Large Language Model, we trained our own proprietary LLM, which we’ve dubbed “Aquinas.” Our model is exposed through our first 2 products: Apologist Agent and Apologist Beacon.
Apologist Agent is our standalone UI. It utilizes Retrieval Augmented Generation (or RAG) by sending snippets from our corpus of theological works as further context when generating a response. It also supports voice dictation for those that prefer. The interface — and responses — are multilingual as well, allowing for a more global distribution. Each response includes 3 recommended resources for further study.
Apologist Beacon is an embeddable version of our Agent that can easily be added to any website. Parameters can be passed to customize the language as well as integrate with Gloo’s Engage platform. When the Gloo phone number and QR code are passed, they appear at the end of each response to prompt the user to continue the conversation with a real person.
Feel free to try our Apologist Agent beta at beta.apologist.ai. Follows the directions for Apologist Beacon if you’d like to try embedding it on your site.