We’re excited to announce the beta release of the ArcGIS documentation assistant.

The documentation assistant uses artificial intelligence (AI) to read ArcGIS documentation and give grounded answers to your questions about Esri products. This capability is currently available throughout ArcGIS documentation sites.

If you want to learn more about ArcGIS products and capabilities, the documentation assistant can help you navigate our extensive collection of resources.

The assistant can add value to your work in a variety of ways, for example:

• Discovery. For newer users of the ArcGIS platform, the assistant can help you find and use tools that you may already have access to. Instead of browsing through documentation and product pages, simply ask your question in natural language.
• Speed up workflows. For experienced users who already have established workflows, the documentation assistant serves as a quick reference guide. It can help you find your way around our documentation and speed up searches when looking for specific information, best practices, or configuration steps.
• Efficiency without handing off the work. The assistant helps you to speed up your existing workflows while keeping you in control. It provides guidance and documentation references rather than performing tasks for you, ensuring that you understand and learn as you work.

Try it out!

To use the documentation assistant, the following items must be true:

• You must sign in with an ArcGIS Online organizational account
• AI assistants must be enabled in your organization
• Your ArcGIS Online administrator must turn off the “Block Esri apps and capabilities while they are in beta” setting.

Learn more about configuring ArcGIS assistants here.

Once these requirements are met, you can access the documentation assistant by clicking the circular sparkle icon at the bottom right of any documentation page.

After you agree to the terms, you can ask any questions about the ArcGIS platform, and the assistant will find relevant documentation to build a response for you.

The assistant includes a few additional helpful features:

• Automatic product detection to determine which products you are asking about and prioritize them in search
• Add focus to prioritize results for specific apps or products (such as ArcGIS Pro)
• Reset button to clear the current conversation and start over
• Multi-language support – communicate in your preferred language
• Follow-up questions below the response to help guide the conversation forward
• References for further reading
• Feedback icons so that you can let us know how the assistant is performing

Here is a practical example of how the documentation assistant could help streamline your work. In the following screenshot, we have set the focus area to ArcGIS Enterprise, then asked the question “Why is my geocoding service returning errors?” The assistant gives a variety of ideas to look at and invites further conversation.

How to write effective prompts

The documentation assistant maintains context about your current conversation, retaining the last four messages plus the current prompt. This allows for natural follow-up questions. Here are some tips for best results:

• Use clear and simple language
• Be specific about the product or capability that you’re asking about
• If the first response isn’t quite what you need, iterate with follow-up questions
• Use the “Add focus” feature to narrow results to specific products
• Remember that each conversation is independent – use the reset button at the top right of the UI to start fresh

We value your feedback!

During the beta stage, we anticipate that there will be issues, and your feedback is crucial to improve the experience. After each response you can:

• Click the thumbs up or thumbs down icons to rate the response
• Complete a brief survey to provide specific feedback about why you gave this rating
• Share what worked well, or what could be improved

Your feedback will be shared anonymously, read by the development team, and help us to enhance the assistant’s accuracy and usefulness. Even if you’re completely satisfied with a response, your positive feedback helps us understand what’s working well.

Final thoughts

At present, the assistant is trained on authoritative Esri publications including product documentation and tutorials for ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Solutions, and more. Additional training data includes the ArcGIS Architecture Center, the ArcGIS Trust Center, Esri Support’s Knowledge Base, Esri’s video library, and the ArcGIS Blog.

We aim to continue improving the documentation assistant over time, including improvements to performance, accuracy, and integration of additional resource types (such as the Living Atlas, limited Esri Press book content, and more). While the assistant is still in beta and may occasionally provide imperfect responses, it’s designed to help you find information faster and discover capabilities you might not have known existed.

Remember that using the documentation assistant doesn’t currently consume any credits, though the workflows it recommends may require credits to execute.

As you explore this new tool, we encourage you to think of it as a knowledgeable colleague who has read all of Esri’s documentation and can help point you in the right direction. It won’t do the work for you, but it will help you be successful.

We’re excited to see how the documentation assistant enhances your ArcGIS experience. If you have any questions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to share them through the feedback mechanism in the assistant interface.