Ask Hortis is an AI companion that lets you work with your collection in plain language. Instead of building a filter, exporting a spreadsheet, or opening records one at a time, you describe what you want and Ask Hortis works across your accessions, plant material, taxa, locations and logs to do it.
Below are five kinds of task people use it for, with an example prompt for each. The examples are a starting point — you can phrase requests however feels natural.
Analyse and summarise
Answer questions that would otherwise mean combining several filters or working in a spreadsheet: counts, breakdowns, comparisons and lists drawn from any part of your collection data.
List all the trees in our collection with a native distribution in the southern hemisphere.
Audit and correct
Find records that don't look right, then fix them together rather than one by one. Adding a record tag as part of the request gives you a list of everything that was changed.
Find all plant material whose mapped position falls outside the boundary of the location it is assigned to. Update these with the correct location and add the record tag "Location updated".
Cross-reference and enrich
Compare your holdings against external botanical sources, and bring what's missing into your database.
Using native distribution data from Plants of the World Online, find Quercus species suited to our climate, tell me which ones we don't already hold, and add those taxa to the database with the record tag "Desiderata".
Record and update
Capture work in the field or on the nursery bench across many records at once — condition observations, treatment notes, or any other log entry.
Add a log note to every rose in Bed A4 with the text "Given fish, blood and bone meal", dated 10 February.
Produce outputs
Turn a question into something you can circulate: a written summary, a table, or a list ready for a board paper or annual return.
Write a report covering all plant material added to and removed from the collection during August.
Tips for better results
- Be specific about scope. Naming the collection site, bed, taxon or date range gives you a tighter answer than a general question will.
- Say what should happen, not just what to find. If you want records updated, include the new value and the exact tag or log text you want applied.
- Check first, then change. For anything that will touch a lot of records, ask to see the matches before asking for the update. You can then refine the request if the list isn't what you expected.
- Build on the previous answer. You don't need to restate everything — follow up with "now group those by family" or "add the accession dates to that list".