Janet: a prototype of a conversational agent for a virtual research environment

Conversational agents have been undergoing a lot of development where they have reached their best nowadays thanks to the large language models that have been developed over the past years. Thanks to this, the capabilities of such agents have become more diverse and they are now able to perform a wide range of tasks which can be harnessed to reduce or even replace the human effort in performing those tasks. Therefore, in an effort to equip scientific communities with such a powerful tool, we developed a prototype conversational agent, Janet, and deployed it into one virtual research environment (VRE) with the aim of supporting the scientists in exploiting the knowledge contained within these environments. Janet is still in the preliminary phase where there is a need for extensive testing and improvement; however, this report shows the main aspects of Janet including the architecture, implementation and deployment.