A Building You Can Ask

Stand in the middle of a shopping mall and ask the assistant on your phone where the baby changing room is. It knows the whole internet and nothing about this building: which floor, which corridor, whether a restroom is closed today. That knowledge lives at one information desk, in one language, during office hours. The venue AI assistant, now live in ToRun, puts it behind a QR code.

The code knows where it hangs

Each code belongs to one spot, not to the building. The code at the entrance and the one on the second floor are different codes, so directions start where the visitor is standing, worked out from the spots and places the venue's staff mark on a floor plan. Nobody installs anything or creates an account. A visitor types a question, or holds the microphone and speaks for up to thirty seconds; the spoken question becomes text and the answer arrives in writing, so it can be read again while walking.

Answers from the venue's own documents

The venue uploads what it already has: a store or exhibitor list, floor information, opening hours, an event schedule, in Word, PDF, Excel or PowerPoint. The assistant is set up to answer from that material only. When the answer is not there, it says so, and the question lands on a separate list.

What the venue keeps

Every answer leaves a record that nobody keeps today. The demand report shows what was asked, at which spot, at what hour and in which language. The asked-but-not-found list, downloadable as a spreadsheet, shows demand the venue cannot meet yet, which matters when a unit stands empty. A visitor who writes that a restroom is closed files a fault report that reaches the person in charge at once, and moves up to the next person if nobody picks it up in time.

What it deliberately does not do

It takes no payment to put one store ahead of another, it does not rate tenants, and it asks visitors for no name, number or account. The records are made of questions, not people.

The software is running. We are looking for the first venues to set it up with, and the pages that explain it, in every language the site offers, are at torun.ai/venues.