Introducing the Quality Coach Researcher

I wrote The Quality Coach's Handbook as a practical guide, something you can pick up for an answer when a question at work arises. Now I wonder if a chatbot could supplement the book by quickly locating relevant content?

I decided to build the Quality Coach Researcher, an augmented service trained on the book. Besides having a ton of fun doing this, it taught me a lot about models, UX and programming.

Quality Coach Researcher

You can ask questions like:

"What is a quality coach?"
"What's the best approach for coaching a senior engineer?"
"How do I handle pushback from stakeholders?"

It'll summarise relevant passages from the book and cite its sources.

It assumes you are a quality coach, but this book has always been intended as a resource for others within an organisation, for example, test leads, software engineers, engineering managers, VPs of Engineering and delivery leads. You can adjust your persona to elicit a slightly different response.

If it can't find the response in the book, it will let you know. It promised me it would do that!!! 🤞🤔

How to use the Quality Coach Researcher

Go to my website and log in. and look for the rotating chat icon in the bottom-right corner. Click and ask away. There's no limit of questions you can ask.

Free during beta

Available to all members (free and paid) during a beta period. What I will do after beta depends on the feedback I get. So let's see!

Feedback welcome

This is early days — if something doesn't work right or you have ideas, let me know. The chatbot has an opportunity for you to provide feedback on the quality of the idea or to provide suggestions. Your input helps me improve it. And of course, I left a ton of bugs in there for you to find – bring it on! 🐞

How the Quality Coach Researcher Works

The Researcher uses AI to help you navigate the Handbook. When you ask a question, it searches the book for relevant content, then sends your question and those excerpts to Together.ai's Llama 3.1 model. The AI generates an answer grounded in what's actually in the Handbook—no making things up. Your conversation history is saved so we can pick up where we left off and keep improving the tool.

A few words on privacy

I've built this with privacy front of mind. Your conversations aren't used to train AI models; all data is encrypted, and we use rate limiting to prevent abuse. I chose Together.ai because they use transparent open-source models and don't train on customer data. For technical details on data handling and your rights, see our Privacy & AI Usage page.

I hope you have as much fun using it as I did building it.

— Anne-Marie