We’re passionate about creating an empowering, collaborative learning environment. That’s why we’re excited to introduce the AI In-Lab Assistant – an intelligent chatbot right inside your lab environment.

We want you to solve challenges independently. The new AI assistant is designed to provide hints and tips on a lab, offering guidance without giving away the answer. The aim is to enhance your learning experience, ensuring you're always ready for what’s next.

🔎 Finding your on-demand learning companion

Getting started is simple. Open a lab, and you’ll see a sparkle icon in the top right corner of your screen.

Clicking this sparkle icon opens the chatbot interface. If the window obstructs your view, you can reposition the chatbot by dragging its top bar. If you need to hide it, click the cross in the top right of the pop-up window or the sparkle icon again.

🔬 How can the assistant help me?

We specifically designed this chatbot to help with lab-related queries and tasks inside the lab environment. You can ask it to summarize the lab briefing, help you understand key concepts (such as "what is a SIEM?"), or assist with specific questions (for instance, "I need help with Task 3!").

The chatbot will give you hints and tips without giving you the exact answer.

For example, if you're tackling enumeration, it might suggest commands like nmap, netstat, or cat. If you're working on privilege escalation, it may encourage you to think about commands like sudo, su, or to look for SUID binaries.

Our sophisticated technology takes snapshots of practical and cloud labs, capturing the necessary context to understand activities on the virtual machine or the command line interface.

✅ Key boundaries and quick tips

We want you to get the most out of the new AI In-Lab Assistant. It keeps to the following main points:

1. It won’t give away the answer: We intentionally designed the chatbot to encourage independent completions, not to directly give you the answer. If you ask outright for the answer to a question, it’ll provide hints for you to figure it out yourself.
2. It only applies to lab content: While you can input any query, the chatbot can only answer questions related to the lab you’re currently in. If you ask a non-lab-related question, such as "how’s the weather today in Bristol?", it’ll tell you it doesn’t have access to real-time data. Instead, it’ll encourage you to ask a question about the lab.
3. History isn’t retained: To start a new chat, click the plus icon next to the New chat button in the top left of the chatbot window. This will clear the current history. Note that you’ll lose your conversation history when you exit a lab or start a new one. The chatbot can only retain seven questions before forgetting them.
4. Exclusions: The AI In-Lab Assistant is available in most labs, but isn’t available in custom labs, adaptive assessments, or any demonstrate labs.

🔐 Data security and feedback you can trust

We want to be upfront about our technology and security because we value authenticity.

Our AI service was built using OpenAI. We prioritize your data security, so we only store your account UUID in the AI service database.

We don’t store any other personally identifiable information (PII) except what you explicitly input as queries, which OpenAI will also receive.

Crucially, we don’t ingest any custom content labs into our AI service, and the service doesn’t have access to any customer data.

We rely on your input to keep improving! You can provide feedback on every response using the thumb-up or thumb-down icons found directly underneath the chatbot’s reply. We monitor this feedback to improve the AI In-Lab Assistant over time.

💁🏻‍♀️ And don’t forget…

If you’d prefer to speak to real humans for hints and tips on your favorite labs, head to the Community and navigate to the Help Forum.

If you aren’t satisfied with the AI In-Lab Assistant’s responses or have technical issues with the feature, reach out to Customer Support via the Help Center.