Silverchair Releases New AI Playground

NISO Member News

Charlottesville, VA | May 7, 2024

Silverchair announced the release of a new AI Playground, the latest from the Silverchair AI Lab, which launched earlier this year with three active prototypes. The AI Lab was designed as a space to transparently pilot potential AI solutions, and the AI Playground is a natural extension of that mission. The AI Playground is a space for Silverchair clients to easily experiment with a variety of AI models, applications, and use cases, to help deepen their understanding of various models and refine their AI priorities. This free, user-friendly tool allows publishers to discover, stress-test, analyze, and refine their AI strategy and offerings.

“The AI landscape is incredibly fast-paced and complex," said Silverchair CTO Stuart Leitch. "Our priority is bringing our clients on the education journey with us. By experimenting together, we can identify the best application of these technologies for their unique audiences. With our clients involved as early as possible, we're building an informed community that can lead the way with innovative and publishing-specific AI tools."

In exploration with clients, Silverchair has found the RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) pattern to be the most transformative in the space, as it pulls specifically from high-value publisher content to answer questions and link to cited content. Possible applications include conversational search, research assistants, content discovery, and building meta-analyses, as well as many others. The challenge is that RAG solutions offer myriad parameters to choose from, each of which can drastically affect the quality of the results.

Silverchair developed the AI Playground specifically to help publishers explore the tradeoffs of these choices and evaluate the effectiveness of different models. Within the tool, publishers may adjust the model, retrieval strategies, response facets, and much more. The tool features built-in up-voting and down-voting on responses to gather live feedback, which is used to tune the tool and inform the ongoing development of AI offerings on the Silverchair Platform.

“When we launched our AI Lab, we committed to working with our clients to co-create an AI future for scholarly publishing,” said Silverchair CEO Will Schweitzer. “The AI Playground is an excellent tool for our clients and other publishers to safely experiment and learn, with help from Silverchair’s AI team if needed. Engaging with these technologies is an important first step in creating useful and valuable AI features, products, and services.”

In the coming weeks, the Silverchair team will be actively engaged with clients, testing parameters against various high-potential use cases and applications to inform ongoing AI product development.