Engineering simulation software vendor Ansys Inc. today announced a limited beta release of a multilingual, conversational, virtual assistant that uses generative artificial intelligence technology and runs across its portfolio.

AnsysGPT was developed with OpenAI LLC’s ChatGPT technology on the Microsoft Corp. Azure cloud using Ansys public data. It can be used to answer technical questions concerning Ansys products, physics and engineering topics. It will also provide the added option of round-the-clock technical support and reduce response times to many common questions to a few seconds, the company said.

Upon its anticipated full release in early 2024, AnsysGPT will provide technical support directly through the company’s website. It’s being trained using company-specific data to generate responses drawn from vetted Ansys resources such as training courses technical documentation, blog posts and how-to-videos. The company said strong controls were put in place to ensure that no proprietary information customer inputs or data were used during training.

In addition to providing technical support, AnsysGPT will identify appropriate resources that customers can access to further research topics such as how machine learning can be used to enhance simulations.

AnsysGPT was designed to be an incremental option for additional customer support, said Anthony Dawson, the company’s vice president of customer excellence. “AnsysGPT combines the domain expertise normally distributed across multiple engineers into one virtual knowledge engine,” he said. “Troubleshooting questions that were normally handled by the Ansys Customer Excellence team can be more easily addressed by our virtual assistant, which frees up our team to provide more advanced and hands-on support.”

Ansys isn’t a newcomer to AI. It uses machine learning to improve turbulence models in computational fluid dynamics, predict computational spending and in process integration and design optimization software for the construction of reduced order models.

Image: Ansys