What's New in Grooper 2025

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Grooper 2025 has not been released yet. This page is a placeholder for internal use only.

AI Assistants and the Chat Page

Full AI Assistant article

What is an AI Assistant?

AI Assistants are Grooper's conversational AI personas. They define a role to be used in Grooper Chat sessions. Each AI Assistant has access to a collection of user-defined resources.

• Normally conversational AIs ("chatbots") only have access to whatever they were trained on.
• These user-defined resources extends the AI Assistant's ability to answer questions on domain specific information contained in documents, databases or retrieved from a web service.

FYI

AI Assistants are a replacement for the "AI Analyst" object. AI Analysts were Grooper's first attempt at a conversational AI. AI Assistants are a substantial improvement. They are able to access document content and data quicker. They are able to answer questions across larger document sets (even an entire Grooper Repository). They have access to more knowledge resources, such as information obtained from a database.

How does a user interact with an AI Assistant?

Users access AI Assistants using the Grooper Chat page. From here, users can select an AI Assistant previously configured in Grooper Design. Users can start new conversations or continue conversations they have previously started.

What resources can AI Assistants connect to?

AI Assistants can connect to the following resources:

• Search Index References - Allows the AI Assistant to retrieve document text content in an Azure AI Search index. Both metadata search and vector searches are supported.
• Table References - Allows the AI Assistant to retrieve data from database tables using SQL queries (If the user defined in the Grooper Data Connection has write permissions, the AI Assistant may also write data to the database).
• Web Service References - Allows the AI Assistant to retrieve data from APIs using web service calls.

The AI Assistant's "retrieval plan" determines which of these resources should be used to respond to the chat. This allows users to query vast amounts of document text (using vector searches in a Search Index Reference), extracted data (stored as metadata in a Search Index Reference) and supplement information in the Grooper Repository with data from external sources (SQL tables and web services). All of this is done with a natural language prompt. No complex syntax required.

What are some benefits to AI Assistants?

AI Assistants provide users with a new way to interact with documents and other resources the AI Assistant can connect to (like databases).

• Users can search for documents and their data using natural language.
• Provides on-demand access to data inside documents. Users can find information without setting up a Data Model and its extraction logic.
• Provides near instant time-to-value. Minimal processing is required in Grooper before users can start chatting with a single document or across large document sets.
• Reduces the need to extract everything up front. Allows users to gain insights into documents without complicated extraction.

HTTP Import

HTTP Import is a new Import Provider in 2025. It allows users to import website content into Grooper Batches. HTTP import can be used to import:

• Individual webpages
• Documents hosted on a website accessible from a URL
• Entire websites

Mechanisms to select links using CSS and filter pages using regular expressions are included in the HTTP Import configuration.

Websites are a great resource for AI Assistants. They can serve as one of many different knowledge resources that can be used to answer users' questions from the Chat page.

HMTL conditioning commands

There are several new HTTP and HTML commands in Grooper. These commands will condition HTML documents for further processing. These commands are particularly useful for preparing HTML documents for an AI Assistant.

• HTTP Link > Load Content - Allows webpages to be imported into Grooper sparsely then loaded multithreaded.
• HTML Document > Condition HTML - This command has several cleanup and normalization options for webpages.
  • The "Body Selector" uses CSS selectors to match an element to replace the HTML's body. This gets rid of unnecessary text content before feeding webpages to an AI Assistant.
  • The "Removal Selector" uses CSS selectors to remove HTML elements. This can help remove unnecessary or repetitive content before feeding webpages to an AI Assistant.
  • The "Site URL" can be prepended to relative links in the HTML page. This will give users a better viewing experience when the page is loaded in the Document Viewer.
• HTML Document > Convert to PDF - Converts the HTML page to a PDF document. Grooper can then process the PDF just like it processes any PDF.
• HTML Document > Convert to Text - Converts the HTML page to a TXT document. This is useful for only for webpages that present as text files (For example this page from the US Code of Federal Regulations hosted on govinfo.gov). It will get rid of unnecessary HTML elements and leave you with just plain text.

AI productivity helpers

Full article on AI productivity helpers

Grooper introduced two "AI productivity helpers" in version 2024. These features use a large language model (LLM) to assist Grooper Design users in their work building Grooper assets. They can be used for help with regular expressions, SQL queries for Database Lookups, even creating full Data Models.

• You must enable the "LLM Connector" option in your Grooper Repository to use these tools.

List of AI productivity helpers

• AI Generated Schema Importer - This helps create Data Models quickly. This tool generates Data Elements in a Data Model from a natural language prompt. Enter something like "Create a Data Model for invoice processing." and this will create unconfigured Data Sections, Data Fields and Data Tables related to invoice processing.
• AI Query Helper - This helps users search for documents in the Grooper Search page. The Search page uses a powerful set of syntaxes to retrieve documents in a search index. For users unfamiliar with this syntax, the AI Query Helper builds the search them from the prompt they enter.
• AI Expression Helper - This helps users craft regular expressions for the Pattern Match extractor.
• Db Lookup Helper - This helps users craft SQL queries for Database Lookups.
• XSLT Helper - This helper can be found in the XML Transform activity's XSLT Tester. This will generate an XSLT transform from the user's prompt.
• AI Helper - This helper shows up all over the place in Grooper, wherever there is a text editor. Potential uses include"
  • Lexicon (and Local List) editors - Generate lists for List Match extractors.
  • Description editors - Generate field descriptions to assist AI Extract.
  • Code expression editors (Calculated Value editors, Default Value editors, Should Submit editors, etc) - Generate expressions based on natural language prompts!

Grooper Web Services (GWS)

Grooper Web Services (GWS) is a new set of Grooper REST API endpoints. GWS is installed as a separate website by the Grooper Web Client installer. It was created to extend our initial API set. New endpoints are included to access AI Assistants and Grooper Search using web calls.

• Eventually GWS will fully replace the initial Grooper REST API offered by API Services. However, API Services will continue to function in this version.

GWS endpoints

AI Assistant related:

• /assistants - These endpoints are for development using AI Assistants. Use this API to implement your own chat client that allows users to interact with Grooper's AI Assistants.
• /bot - These endpoints integrate AI Assistants with Microsoft Azure Bot services. These endpoints are called by the Azure Bot service. Do not call these endpoints directly.

Search related:

• /search

Document processing related:

Misc

XML processing and transform improvements

- schema importer improvements - xml commands - xml transform namespace support

Run import on root

ONLY FOR TESTING Large scale production imports should still be managed from the Import Jobs page or by Import Watcher schedules.