Every year, visitors walk into the Lombachalp above Habkern (Canton Bern) — a fragile, legally protected moor and wildlife landscape — without knowing the rules or the alpine risks. Static signage doesn’t travel with them, and it doesn’t speak their language. A storm building on the ridge, the last PostBus down, a no-entry moor: the information exists in world-class Swiss open data, but not in the visitor’s hand at the moment they need it.
So we built a demo of a different idea: put a ranger on the phone the visitor already carries.
A ranger who speaks your language — and shows its sources
Ask the Ranger is a mobile-first, multilingual AI assistant. It auto-detects the device language and answers in the visitor’s own — the chat understands 20+ languages. But the point isn’t the chat; it’s what the chat is grounded in. Instead of a static FAQ, the ranger reasons over five real, free, keyless live data tools, all Swiss- or EU-hosted:
- Weather, storm, UV and sunset via Open-Meteo / MeteoSwiss ICON-CH1
- The last PostBus down from Habkern via transport.opendata.ch
- Daylight remaining, computed offline on-device with SunCalc — so it works on signal-dead ridges
- Where am I / nearest peak / trail difficulty via swisstopo GeoAdmin
- Protected-zone rules via BAFU zones on geo.admin.ch
The magic is in the chaining: “A storm is building around 18:00 and you have roughly 1h40 of usable light — turn back now; the last PostBus from Habkern is 18:36.” And every rule answer pairs the what with the why — the geo.admin.ch point-in-polygon lookup returns not just that you’ve entered a protected moor, but the legal status, the season, and the conservation reason behind the restriction.
Teach the rules first, then tune the voice
Before going online, a captive-portal flow walks guests through the reserve’s 8 restrictions one at a time — dogs on leash, stay on marked trails, no drones, respect winter wildlife-rest zones — each with a photo, a plain-language rule, and a conservation why, before an anonymous, timestamped confirmation. No login, no email, no per-visitor data kept.
Behind the ranger sits a playground cockpit to tune the persona “Ranger Lukas” — his warmth, strictness and verbosity, and which tools he may reach for. The value compass is deliberate: keep you safe, protect the wildlife and moor, help you enjoy it — in a friendly, non-authoritarian voice.
This is a pilot demo, not a live public service — you can try it yourself at hotspot.operal.tech. The rules were always there; now they answer back.