David Straub
Gramps Web AI Assistant Gets Smarter
A significantly improved version of the Gramps Web AI assistant is now live on Grampshub, making it better at answering genealogical questions about relationships and family connections.
What’s New
Since the AI assistant was first introduced on Grampshub, it has been able to use semantic search to find relevant information in your family database. This worked well for straightforward questions like “who are the carpenters in my family tree?” However, it struggled with seemingly simple queries such as “where were the grandparents of John Doe born?” The reason was that it couldn’t navigate relationships or apply genealogical filters.
The new version addresses this limitation. The AI assistant can now:
- Navigate family relationships: Find ancestors or descendants of any person in your tree
- Filter by properties: Search for people born in specific date ranges or associated with particular places
- Query events: Find events by location or time period
These capabilities can be combined, so the assistant might first identify a person, then find their grandparents, and finally retrieve birth information for those individuals – all in a single answer.
Keep your expectations realistic: How well the assistant performs still depends heavily on the completeness and quality of your tree data. If information is missing or inconsistent, the assistant may not be able to find what you’re looking for. The improvement is in what types of questions it can attempt to answer, not in its ability to work with incomplete data. As you explore what works and what doesn’t, please share your experience with the community through the Gramps forum to help guide future improvements.
Switching to Mistral AI
Alongside this upgrade, Grampshub has switched the language model provider from OpenAI to Mistral AI, a European company headquartered in Paris. For a service based in Europe, working with a European AI provider offers natural advantages in terms of proximity, regulatory alignment, and a shared European approach to data protection – factors that matter to many of our users.
Privacy Remains a Priority
AI chat is completely optional and disabled by default. No information is ever sent to any AI provider unless you explicitly enable the AI assistant. Tree owners have full control over this feature through the user management section in the Gramps Web settings, where you can select which user groups are allowed to use AI chat.
When the assistant is enabled and you use it, only the specific information needed to answer your question is sent to the language model – never your entire family tree. Since Gramps Web is open source, you can inspect exactly how the AI assistant works and what data is sent.
Getting Started
If you’re already using the AI assistant on Grampshub, you should notice improvements in its ability to answer relationship-based questions. The transition to Mistral AI happens seamlessly in the background – no action is required on your part.
For those who haven’t tried the AI assistant yet, you can enable it in the user management section of your Gramps Web settings.
Last but not least, remember to always verify the assistant’s answers against your actual records.