About TorahAI
TorahAI answers questions about Jewish texts from the texts themselves. It is an open alpha: a test version, open to anyone, that can be wrong.
How an answer is made
- Your question is searched in a library of about 470,000 passages: the Tanakh, the Mishnah, the Babylonian Talmud, the Rambam's Mishneh Torah and the Shulchan Arukh, with their main commentaries, in Hebrew or Aramaic and, where one exists, in English.
- An AI model reads the passages found and judges which ones bear on the question.
- Another AI model writes the answer from those passages only, and gives the exact words it relies on for every statement.
- Before anything is shown, every quotation is checked against the text in the library. A paragraph whose quotation cannot be found there is not shown.
The check proves that the quoted words are really in the source. It does not prove that the source means what the sentence around it says, so read the sources yourself; each one opens on Sefaria.
What it does not do
TorahAI sets out what the sources say and where they disagree. It does not rule, and it is not a rabbi. For a practical question, ask your rav. When nothing in the library answers a question closely enough to cite, it says so instead of guessing.
Privacy: what is stored
- Your questions and the answers are saved on our server, with the passages that were found. We need them to check answers, to build shared links and to improve the tool. They are not linked to your name: there are no accounts.
- Repeated questions: if someone else has asked exactly the same question in the last 30 days, you may be shown the answer they were given, marked as an earlier answer and with its quotations checked again. Nothing about who asked it is shown. You can always ask for a new answer.
- A random browser id (a cookie that expires after 30 days) and a scrambled form of your network address (a salted hash, never the address itself) are kept with a record of each request, to apply the daily limits and the spending cap. During those 30 days the record could be matched to a question by its time; after 30 days the browser id and the network hash are removed from it, and only the cost stays.
- Your list of past questions is kept in your browser only; clearing the site's data removes it.
- Shared links are unlisted and not shown to search engines, but anyone who has a link can read it. Only the person who made a link can stop it.
- There are no ads and no analytics or tracking scripts. Fonts are served from this site. The texts open on sefaria.org when you click a source.
- The hosting service keeps its own access logs (with network addresses) for a short time.
Sources and licences
All texts come from Sefaria, through its public export. Each text has its own licence, shown on its source card next to the name of the edition or translation:
- Public Domain and CC0: free to use.
- CC-BY: free to use with credit to the edition named on the card (licence).
- CC-BY-SA: free to use with credit, and adaptations must be shared alike (licence).
- CC-BY-NC: free to use with credit for non-commercial purposes (licence); this includes some English translations, such as the William Davidson Talmud and the Touger translation of the Mishneh Torah.
- Licence not stated by Sefaria: Sefaria gives no licence for these editions (often editions it compiled from several sources).
TorahAI is a non-commercial project. The quotations shown are short and always credited to their edition.
Contact
A contact address will be added here before the alpha is announced.