How Drupal Developers Can Now Add Semantic Search and AI Chatbots with Ease

Reflecting on an early‑career moment when a client asked whether their Drupal site could support “semantic search,” Akhil recounted how the term initially caught him off guard. At the time, he misunderstood it as just an improved keyword match, only to quickly realise it referred to search systems that understand meaning and context — not just literal terms.

Now, nearly a decade later, that's changed. Akhil’s session focused on Drupal's AI Search module, showcasing how developers can now implement semantic search without major architectural overhauls. The session included a live demo on:

• Setting up a local vector database
• Chunking and embedding content
• Indexing with sentence‑transformers
• Enhancing traditional keyword search to behave more semantically, without changing the UI

He also demonstrated building a Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) agent, allowing users to interact with a Drupal site's content through a chatbot interface.

The session was recorded and is available to watch here: YouTube recording.

The Drupal AI Foundation webinars are part of an ongoing effort to make AI tools more accessible to open‑source developers and content teams working with Drupal.