Ask in German or Russian: SeferAI now answers in your language

Until this week, SeferAI answered in English or Hebrew, whatever language you asked in. Now it answers in the language of your question. Ask in German and the answer is German; ask in Russian and it is Russian. English and Hebrew work as before.

The sources stay the sources

The library SeferAI draws on is Sefaria's: Hebrew and Aramaic originals, most with English translations. When you ask in German or Russian, SeferAI finds the right passages in that library - it translates your question into the words the sources use, so a question about honouring parents in German still leads to Exodus 20:12 - and writes its answer around them in your language.

German: Sefaria's own German translations

Sefaria holds published German translations of many works: Rav Hirsch's commentary on the Torah, much of the Talmud and the Mishnah, the Kitzur Shulchan Arukh and more. SeferAI now searches all of them - about 158,000 passages. Where a German translation exists, you see it, marked "Deutsche Übersetzung (Sefaria)".

We tell you what is translated

Every answer in German or Russian begins with a short note. It says that quotations from Hebrew, Aramaic and English sources in the answer were translated by AI and may differ from the originals, and that the originals are one click away in the sources. In German, passages from Sefaria's published German translations are the exception, and are marked as such. Sefaria has almost no Russian translations, so in a Russian answer every quotation is an AI translation, and the note says so. We think this matters: SeferAI exists to bring you as close to the sources as possible, and you should always know when you are reading a translation.

Better sources in every language

Behind this is a change to how SeferAI chooses its sources. On 200 test questions taken from Sefaria's own topic pages, the right source is now among the passages an answer is built from 108 times, where it used to be 78.

Still to come

Podcasts are in English and Hebrew for now; SeferAI tells you so if you ask for one in another language. The website's menus and buttons in German and Russian are next.