Ask Zia™

Introducing Ask Zia

Ask Zia is a locally focused information tool for Santa Fe and northern New Mexico. The long-term goal is to bring together local news, public information, and business listings in one place, then add a conversational search layer for people who want faster answers without losing the original sources.

The goal is simple: make it easier to understand what is happening locally without depending entirely on social feeds, national platforms, or algorithmic timelines that were not built for this community.

This is a limited beta. Right now, the working feature is News. You can use Ask Zia to browse local headlines, search news sources, and, with a free account, ask conversational questions about recent coverage. Business discovery and other local search features are still in development.

What Ask Zia Does Today

Ask Zia currently has two News modes.

If you are just visiting, you can browse the latest local news and search headlines with a simple keyword search. No AI is required for that. The public experience is meant to stay useful, direct, and source-first.

If you create a free account, Ask Zia becomes conversational for news. You can ask questions like:

- What Mayor Michael Garcia been up to lately?

- Are there any recent public safety stories I should know about?

- What news of Santa Fe Public Schools?

Ask Zia searches the available local news sources, summarizes what it finds, and shows the articles it used. If you want the full context, you can click through to the original source.

Why Build This

Local information is harder to follow than it should be. Important stories are spread across newspapers, TV stations, public agencies, community organizations, and small independent outlets. Social media can surface some of it, but it often mixes reporting with rumor, outrage, and whatever happens to be optimized for attention.

Ask Zia is my effort to build a different kind of local technology: one that helps people find information, not one that tries to trap them in a feed.

The app does not replace local journalism. It depends on it. Ask Zia is designed to make local reporting easier to discover, easier to search, and easier to connect back to the original publishers.

News First, More Later

The first version of Ask Zia focuses on local news. It collects feeds from regional sources, keeps them searchable, and lets users ask natural-language questions about recent coverage.

The next major piece will be local business discovery. The plan is for businesses to create an account, manage a listing, upload images, and provide details like categories, hours, contact information, and a description. Visitors will be able to browse and search listings, while signed-in users will eventually be able to ask Ask Zia for recommendations like a local concierge.

That means Ask Zia is not only intended to be a news chatbot. The larger idea is a local search and discovery layer for Santa Fe and northern New Mexico. But in this limited beta, News is the feature to try.

Source-first AI

AI is useful only if people can inspect where the answer came from. Ask Zia is built around retrieval and citations, not standalone generated content.

When Ask Zia answers a news question, it searches local articles first. The answer is grounded in those results, and the matching source cards are shown with the response.

The chatbot is there to reduce friction, not to become the authority. The authority remains the original reporting, public information, and business-provided details.

Privacy and Feedback

Because Ask Zia is in beta, feedback matters. Users can rate answers with thumbs up or thumbs down, and account settings include controls for whether chat interactions may be used to improve the product.

The app is also designed to separate raw chat history from redacted quality analytics. If a user deletes saved chats, those raw messages are removed and the deleted thread is excluded from future evaluation sampling.

This will continue to evolve as the terms, privacy policy, and product mature, but the principle is already clear: local trust matters.

Try the Beta

You can visit Ask Zia at askzia.co.

Without an account, you can browse news and perform simple news searches. With a free account, you can use the Ask Zia news chatbot, save conversations, and ask follow-up questions in context.

This is still an early, limited beta. Some answers will be better than others, some sources will need tuning, and additional features will come online over time. But the direction is set: Ask Zia is being built as a locally owned, locally useful alternative for finding information about the place we live.