Will Chatbots Replace Rabbis?
summary
A chatbot called Virtual Havruta is built on Sefaria’s ~350 million words and uses retrieval augmented generation to ground answers and reduce hallucinations; an MVP ships in under four months and already serves 50+ users including rabbis, scholars and community members, returning branch-aware answers (Reform/Conservative/Orthodox), citation links and source snippets. The pilot works as a study sparring partner but still needs more digitized texts, compute and funding to scale globally.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction to the panel
- 0:30Tradition of Jewish study
- 2:56Introducing Virtual Havruta
- 4:47Meet the expert panel
- 6:01Project video presentation
- 8:24Genesis and collaboration
- 11:16Technical AI approach
- 12:50Addressing ethical concerns
- 15:10Future impact and vision
- 18:03Scaling and concluding
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