APA Rulebook Chatbot
AI-powered instant lookup for APA billiards rules
Hosted on Render's free tier — may take 30–60 seconds to wake up on first load.
A conversational AI assistant that answers questions about APA 8-ball and 9-ball rules. Players can ask natural language questions mid-game and get accurate, cited answers pulled directly from the official rulebook.
The Problem
APA league players frequently need quick rule clarifications during matches. The official rulebook is a 90+ page PDF split across two documents — not something you can easily search mid-game. Ctrl+F fails when the question uses different words than the rulebook.
The Solution
A RAG chatbot that understands the meaning behind a question, finds the most relevant rulebook sections, and generates a concise cited answer. Unlike a standard chatbot that relies on training data, this system grounds every answer in the actual APA rulebook text. Claude never guesses — it only answers from retrieved content.
Tech Stack
Key Features
- Semantic search — finds relevant rules even when wording differs from the rulebook
- RAG pipeline ingesting 406 chunks from two APA rulebook PDFs via pdfplumber
- Cited answers grounded in retrieved rulebook text with source document references
- Conversation history with follow-up question support
- Source sections expander showing retrieved chunks with similarity scores
