Answer Assistant

A vision to explore if AI can help improve the answer experience and encourage knowledge sharing by leveraging AI-generated answers verified by the community.

Last updated April 29, 2025
Product

As we look across upcoming initiatives, we want to discover if AI can make knowledge creation easier, more inclusive, and a more collaborative experience— all while maintaining a high bar for content quality. After all, the internet is changing rapidly, and in a landscape where trusted knowledge can be hard to find, human validation is key.

Answer Assistant was an experiment, on participating Stack Exchange sites, in which AI-generated answers are verified, edited, and curated by the community before becoming publicly visible. The goal of this test was to see if Answer Assistant helps streamline productivity, so users can get unstuck faster, as well as improve their answer experience in a private, controlled environment. Encouraging collaborative knowledge sharing in a new way could help plant the seed for growing the next generation of contributors in those communities.

Why build Answer Assistant?

  • Evaluate if Answer Assistant reduces unanswered questions and increases engagement within each community.
  • Assess if AI-generated answers can help reduce friction by helping users find answers to their questions without having to jump around to different tools or sites.
  • AI-suggested answers may help bridge the gap between passive users and the next generation of editors and curators in the community by lowering the barrier to taking action on the site.

How does Answer Assistant work?

The experiment appeared on a few participating Stack Exchange sites whose moderators agreed to participate. In the Answer Assistant experiment:

  1. A private AI-suggested answer will be generated by an LLM if the question meets site-specific criteria (customizable per community throughout the experiment).
  2. Site moderators and logged-in users with a certain amount of reputation points within those communities will be able to see and verify those private answers.
  3. If a private answer is verified by enough users and reaches a net positive score, it becomes public and it will be attributed to an account labeled “Answer Bot.”
  4. Finally, any user viewing the Stack Exchange site can utilize the now public answer to get unstuck or find a solution to their problem, faster.

*The private AI-generated answer will be visually different from human-authored answers, and it will be clearly labeled that the AI answer is private, may be incorrect, and needs verification by members of the community.

About Labs

Since 2008 Stack Overflow has pioneered open source conversations in the technology community, helping us become the most visited, most trusted destination for developers in the world. In 2017, we unleashed the same productivity gains inside companies with Stack Overflow for Teams.

Knowledge sharing between peers and experts is fundamental to software development ‒ you can see it happening in Slack, in meetings, or quick hangs. Advances in technology, like GenAI, puts everyone in learning mode and knowledge sharing is at the core of that experience.

Stack Overflow for Teams sits at the very intersection of curiosity and innovation, a place to ask & answer your peers’ questions, learn from other experts within the company, and keep up with ‒ or be the driver of ‒ all new developments.

Our guiding principles

Find new ways to give technologists more time to create amazing things.
Accuracy is fundamental. That comes from attributed, peer-reviewed sources that provide transparency.
The coding field should be accessible to all, including beginners to advanced users.
Humans should always be included in the application of any new technology.

With these in mind, starting over the next few months, we will be sharing our ideas, opinions, designs, research and product ideas which combine emerging technologies with our platforms and services.