Ask one question and get an answer drawn from the vessel's manuals, handovers, procedures, maker correspondence and spares register at once — with the page it came from. The AI runs on a server in the engine control room. Nothing leaves the ship.
The demonstration uses a fictional vessel and pre-written answers. It shows the interface and the flow, not a live system.
No answer without a source. The engineer sees the manual page, the handover entry or the message the claim came from, and can judge it.
The index and the model run on a box aboard. No cloud, no API, no account. Pull the network cable and it keeps working.
It reads the handovers your crew already writes. Requiring new daily data entry is what kills shipboard software, so it asks for none.
It prepares job text for a human to approve and paste. It never becomes the maintenance record — that record is surveyed, and it should stay where it is.
Vessel Reference is an AI system. A vision-language model reads your scanned manuals and drawings the way an engineer does, and a retrieval model finds the right page out of hundreds of thousands. Both run on a single server in the engine control room.
Scanned manuals and drawings stay images. The model looks at the page — so a schematic, a nameplate photo or a dense parts table is understood rather than mangled by OCR first.
Each statement carries the page, handover or message it came from. The engineer checks the source in one click. An AI that cannot show its working has no place in an engine room.
No fine-tuning, no uploads, no vendor learning from your fleet. The models are used as they come; the intelligence is in how they are applied to your library.
No API key, no account, no internet. Mid-Atlantic with the satellite down, it answers exactly as it does alongside.
Seven minutes, narrated. Every page of the system, and the network switched off halfway through.
The manual tells you what the maker specified. It does not tell you that the same fault happened on the sister set eighteen months ago, that the cause was a chafed cable, that the service engineer has since written to say the gland was redesigned, or that there is one spare left in Store 4.
Those four things live in four different places, and no system aboard joins them. A chief engineer joins them from memory — and that memory leaves at the end of the contract.
Try that question in the demonstration →
It will not trace a circuit and tell you which breaker feeds what. It returns the drawing, the sheet and the zone, and the engineer reads it — so it never gives a confident wrong answer about an isolation.
It will not write a permit to work. It can pre-fill your own approved template from the drawing and the manual, but a human reviews and signs. Nothing is issued autonomously.
It will not index a personal mailbox. Named technical mailboxes only, agreed in writing and listed in the scope.
Built by a marine electrical and automation engineer with eight years at sea, most recently as Automation Engineer on a passenger vessel, now working as a software engineer.
The design decisions here — page images instead of OCR, no new daily logging, reporting into the PMS rather than replacing it, drawings returned rather than interpreted — come from having stood in the engine room at 03:00 with an alarm sounding and the manual on a share drive nobody could search.
If you run an engineering department or a technical fleet team and this sounds like a problem you have, get in touch. The first conversation is about your document library, not a sales pitch.