ChatEurope: What's the Status of Europe's AI-driven News Bot?
,Kicked off in the spring of 2025, the ChatEurope project only needed a few months to launch an initial version of its core digital service, which made a big promise: To give people in Europe reliable, straight-forward answers to all kinds of questions regarding European affairs; initially in seven languages, but with the goal of providing information in all official EU languages. The deployed technology: A web-based news aggregator with an LLM-driven chatbot wired into it. The AI tool under-delivered at first, but has gotten a lot better – thanks to a committed consortium that wants to build a truly useful and trustworthy service.
Before we get into the details, let's do a quick recap of who's behind ChatEurope. As a matter of fact, the project hasn't been introduced in this blog yet, even though DW Corporate Comms published an article in July (on the occasion of the official launch of the website).
The EU-funded consortium consists of 15 partners, most of which are media organizations, like Agence France-Presse (AFP), Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata (ANSA), Agora, Deutsche Press-Agentur (dpa), or Maldita, all of whom provide journalistic input. Meanwhile, XWiki takes care of the publishing infrastructure, and AI specialist DRUID focuses on the development of the AI-driven chatbot.
DW's role in the project is manifold – and once again located at the intersection of journalism and technology. While our colleagues from ENTR are busy curating and producing content, DW's Research and Cooperation Projects team brings its expertise in AI-powered language technology–particularly via plain X, a smart platform for transcription, translation, subtitling and voice-over generation. We also work closely with DRUID to develop and evaluate the AI-powered interactions. Ever since its launch, we've been actively testing and refining the chatbot to ensure it provides accurate and helpful output – not "outdated and incorrect answers", as criticized in this Decoder article published shortly after the ChatEurope website went live. We've learned so much about dealing with tons of news feeds, pre-prompting and post-prompting, and reigning in hallucinations. About always putting users first and being more transparent.
Or as the engineering team over at DRUID put it so well:
"Refining a chatbot to deliver reliable quality goes beyond the AI model–it requires orchestrating the whole ecosystem. We focus on three essentials: structured, compliant, and multilingual content as the foundation; continuous fine-tuning through feedback loops, human validation, and performance monitoring; and strong governance, with clear guardrails, system integration for data accuracy, and security."
Following these principles, we are certain the consortium is now on the right track. Christine Buhagiar, Director of Development and Diversifications at AFP hopes that "our platform will become a leading source for people in Europe, providing clear answers on EU affairs and helping to strengthen a shared sense of European identity."
After all, AI chatbots won't go away. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, they already account for 15% of weekly news use among people under 25. AI chatbots are set to become the new standard of media consumption. "With ChatEurope, we are embracing this new approach," says our colleague Christine.
To test ChatEurope (and leave feedback), follow this link: https://chateurope.eu
Stay tuned for more updates – and a continuously improving service.
