The NDS Association continues to elevate the experience for map and navigation developers working with navigation data standards in the automotive industry. As part of this effort, we have introduced the NDS Expert AI Assistant, a dedicated conversational AI tool designed to help developers navigate wide knowledge base more efficiently.
Integrated directly into the NDS Developer Portal, the AI assistant enables an intuitive conversational way to explore NDS specifications, guiding users through the portal with contextual answers and direct references to relevant documentation. By bringing innovative technologies such as conversational AI into its daily operations, the NDS Association aims to reduce developer ramp-up time, simplify access to knowledge, and support faster, more confident development of navigation solutions.
NDS.Live is designed as a highly modular navigation data standard, enabling flexibility, scalability, and support for a wide range of automotive use cases. While this modularity is a key strength of NDS.Live, it also introduces complexity, particularly when developers are onboarding or exploring unfamiliar modules.
The NDS.Live specification is distributed across multiple documentation layers, each addressing different aspects of the standard:
In practice, information relevant to a single development task or use case is often spread across several documents and modules. Developers may need to switch between guides, tools, specifications, and design documents to fully understand how different components interact within NDS.Live.
As a result, gaining a holistic view of a feature, tool, or use case can take time, especially for developers new to the NDS ecosystem or those working across multiple modules. This fragmentation can increase ramp-up time and make it more difficult to quickly locate relevant answers within the growing body of NDS documentation.
To address the challenges posed by highly modular and distributed documentation, the NDS Association has introduced a conversational AI assistant powered by large language models and trained on NDS.Live knowledge base.
The NDS Expert AI Assistant enables developers to interact with NDS.Live documentation in a natural, conversational way. Instead of manually searching across multiple guides and specifications, developers can ask direct questions and receive contextual answers that reference relevant parts of the official documentation just like speaking with another person. The assistant also offers contextual prompts that help continue the conversation and guide users toward acquiring comprehensive knowledge on a specific topic. This approach significantly reduces the time required to understand concepts, locate specifications, and explore implementation details.
By providing immediate, context-aware responses across user guides and module documentation, the assistant helps developers build a mental model of NDS.Live more quickly. This results in a noticeably shorter ramp-up time, particularly for new developers or teams integrating NDS.Live for the first time.
The NDS Expert AI Assistant is now available at: https://chat.nds.liveIn the latest version, all users of the NDS Developer Portal, including non-NDS members, can access the AI assistant, supporting wider adoption and feedback from the developer community.
The NDS Expert AI Assistant is designed with a focus on reliability, data integrity, and alignment with official NDS specifications. The chat application itself runs on NDS-managed servers, ensuring controlled access, data governance, and compliance with NDS operational requirements.
At its core, the AI assistant uses a Large Language Model (LLM) provided by Mistral AI. To ensure responses remain grounded in authoritative sources, the assistant does not rely solely on the general knowledge of the language model. Instead, it integrates NDS.Live content through a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach.
Scope of knowledge covered by the NDS Expert AI Assistant
The AI assistant’s knowledge base is continuously aligned with the latest NDS.Live releases and includes:
When a developer submits a query, the assistant retrieves relevant content from this curated knowledge base and uses it to generate context-aware responses. This approach improves accuracy and ensures that answers are directly linked to official NDS documentation.
Key Features of the NDS Expert AI Assistant
The NDS Expert AI Assistant is designed to feel familiar to developers while remaining tightly integrated with official NDS.Live content. Its key features include:
Together, these features enable a more intuitive and efficient way to explore NDS.Live documentation without losing traceability to authoritative sources.
Plans for future development
The NDS Association continues to evolve the NDS Expert AI Assistant based on developer feedback and emerging needs. Planned enhancements include:
These improvements aim to further reduce onboarding effort and support advanced development workflows.
The first version of the NDS Expert AI Assistant was presented at the NDS Conference 2025 in Japan.
You can watch the presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5RZT4qsvLc
The NDS Expert AI Assistant represents an important step toward improving how developers interact with navigation data standards. By simplifying access to NDS.Live documentation and reducing ramp-up time, the assistant helps developers focus more on building robust navigation solutions and less on navigating complex specifications.
For NDS members, the AI assistant supports continued progress toward reliable map data foundations for software-defined vehicles (SDVs), automated driving, and future mobility applications. By adopting innovative technologies such as conversational AI, the NDS Association reinforces its commitment to advancing industry-wide navigation data standards.
Developers are invited to explore the NDS Expert AI Assistant and experience its benefits firsthand: https://chat.nds.live
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