About this demo

This is a standalone demonstration of the Ascension Press content-discovery chatbot platform APIs. It streams answers over a WebSocket, renders citations from the Ascension media library, and shows how the input/output guardrails behave.

This is not the production application. The production front end is owned and built by STRV. This app exists to demonstrate and exercise the deployed chat contract (see docs/api/chat-interface.md in the platform repository).

Modes

By default the demo runs in mock mode — scripted conversations that use the real wire frames, so no network access or credentials are needed. Live mode talks to the deployed API Gateway WebSocket.

Browser authorization limitation

The deployed gateway authenticates WebSocket handshakes with an Authorization: Bearer header. Browsers cannot set headers on a WebSocket handshake, so a direct live-mode connection from this page currently fails with 401. Live mode is intended for clients that can set the header, until the gateway identity source is extended.