ChavrutAI Talmud Web App Launch: Review and Comparison with Similar Platforms

I’m excited to announce the live and fully-featured ChavrutAI Talmud Web App!¹

The current features of ChavrutAI web app are as follows:²

Display & Navigation Features:

1. Breadcrumb Navigation: Breadcrumb hierarchy displaying tractate, chapter number and title, and page.

2. Previous/Next page controls

3. Section Navigation: Individual sections within each page are clickable with direct links to Sefaria, plus a floating navigation widget in the bottom-right corner showing current section position and allowing quick navigation between sections.

4. Page Continuation Preview: A preview of the following page's opening section is displayed, helping maintain continuity (and prevent interrupted sentences) across page boundaries.

5. Warm color scheme throughout the interface

6. User Preferences System: Customizable text size controls (Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large) for both Hebrew and English. Alternative Hebrew font selection and dark mode toggle.

Text Processing Features:

1. Intelligent English Text Splitting: Advanced punctuation-based paragraph breaks

2. Term Replacement System: Text processing via a dictionary for more precise terminology

3. Ordinal Number Conversion: Automatic conversion of written ordinals to numeric format for enhanced readability. (E.g. "fourth" → "4th", "twenty-ninth" → "29th")

Next steps for the ChavrutAI web app

In general, there are a number of relatively minor bug fixes that need to be made, both in Display & Navigation, and in Text Processing. In addition, chapter names and ranges aren’t perfect, and some fixes are needed.

As for features, the two major next steps that I’m envisioning are:

1. Labeling named entities and technical terms via gazetteers³

2. LLM/ chatbot integration

Outline

Intro

1. Current features of ChavrutAI web app

   1. Display & Navigation Features

   2. Text Processing Features

2. Next steps for ChavrutAI web app

Current state, and detailed comparison with other websites, via screenshots

1. Table of Contents - general - all of Talmud tractates

2. Table of Contents - by tractate (example: tractate Shabbat)

3. Page (example: Shabbat 31a, section 6)

4. Display Preferences

ChavrutAI Suggested Pages

Current state, and detailed comparison with other websites, via screenshots

This is a detailed comparison, via screenshots, between the Talmud viewers of the following websites:

1. Sefaria

2. Al Hatorah

3. Chabad (“Torah Texts”)

4. ChavrutAI

(Note: All screenshots are in tablet view.)

Table of Contents - general - all of Talmud tractates

Sefaria

https://www.sefaria.org/texts/Talmud

Al Hatorah

https://shas.alhatorah.org/

Chabad (“Torah Texts”)

https://www.chabad.org/torah-texts/5299425/The-Talmud

ChavrutAI

https://chavrutai.com/contents

Table of Contents - by tractate (example: tractate Shabbat)

Sefaria

https://www.sefaria.org/Shabbat?tab=contents⁴

Al Hatorah

https://shas.alhatorah.org/

By chapter (only shows Hebrew, English option doesn’t show English transliteration, and no chapter numbers):

By page:

Chabad (“Torah Texts”)

https://www.chabad.org/torah-texts/5299425/The-Talmud

ChavrutAI

https://chavrutai.com/contents/shabbat

Page - Hebrew & English Side-by-Side (example: Shabbat 31a, section 6)

Sefaria

https://www.sefaria.org/Shabbat.31a.6

Al Hatorah

https://shas.alhatorah.org/Full/Shabbat/31a.6

Chabad (“Torah Texts”)

https://www.chabad.org/torah-texts/5442748/The-Talmud/Shabbat/Chapter-2/31a⁵

ChavrutAI

https://chavrutai.com/tractate/shabbat/31a#section-6

Display Preferences

Sefaria

Upon clicking the “A” icon at the top right, this menu appears:

Al Hatorah

Upon clicking the “gear” icon in the top center, additional options appear, I added arrows in the screenshot to highlight the basic display preferences (the rest are mostly related to toggling the display of specific commentaries):

Chabad (“Torah Texts”)

Upon clicking the “settings sliders” icon at the top right:

ChavrutAI

Upon clicking the “hamburger” icon at the top left, the relevant menu appears in the hamburger menu, in the middle:

ChavrutAI Suggested Pages

https://chavrutai.com/suggested-pages

Each one links directly to the suggested page.

Screenshot:

1. See my previous piece on the ChavrutAI web app project here (with links to my other previous pieces on the project): "Designing ChavrutAI: Building a Customized Talmud Interface for the Digital Age".

And see my related review two years ago at the Seforim Blog, “From Print to Pixel: Digital Editions of the Talmud Bavli”; this current piece is more focused as well as updated.

The current live ChavrutAI web app was built with Replit (using Replit’s AI agent), and is hosted by them.

I’d love to hear any feedback, comments, questions, or thoughts on possible collaborations. My contact info is at my “About” page.

2. As listed at the ChavrutAI “About” page. This list focuses on aspects that are significantly different from Sefaria's and other relevant web apps.

Compare the detailed comparison later in the main piece.

3. See my previous piece on this; Chabad’s Talmud web app has some hyperlinked labels.

Once that’s done, I plan to use that for Talmud indexing, and Table of Contents showing labels based on themes.

On the latter, compare Mordechai Torczyner's “WebShas - Topical Index to the Talmud”. That’s an Alphabetical Index of Topics, I’m envisioning the display of topics by page.

4. English page only shows English transliteration; Hebrew page only shows Hebrew, with no chapter numbers.

On the Table of Contents per tractate in Sefaria, and other potential styles of Table of contents, see my previous piece.

5. There doesn’t seem to be the option of linking to a specific section, the way the other websites can, despite the fact that Chabad uses the same ed. Steinsaltz and the same section split as the other websites.