Last week, I had a close call with my municipal council—nearly facing a fine for tossing the remains of ground coffee into the wrong bin. What seemed like a simple mistake quickly spiraled into an hour-long quest through the council’s website, desperately trying to decipher their waste sorting guidelines. After much frustration, I finally discovered that ground coffee belongs in the food waste bin! It hit me then—what if there was an easier way? What if I could just ask a question like, “Where does this go?” and get an instant answer? That’s when the idea for this chatbot was born—a smart assistant to take the guesswork out of waste sorting.

In this talk, I’ll guide you through the architecture of an AI-powered chatbot that does exactly that. Using Langchain4J, we’ll transform unstructured text from municipal websites into a fast, intuitive AI tool that helps users sort waste correctly. We’ll try to understand how AI is used to process natural language queries, turning them into embeddings, which are then matched against a vector database in Pinecone. Using Langchain4J’s powerful abstractions like LLMChain, EmbeddingChain, and VectorStore, we’ll show how this solution provides near-instant results, offering a seamless user experience.

For Java developers, this session will be a deep dive into integrating AI into your projects using Langchain4J. You’ll learn how to leverage language models, vector-based searches, and scalable architectures to bring smart, real-time functionality into your applications. Whether you’re interested in chatbots, recommendation engines, or other AI-powered tools, you’ll walk away with the knowledge to drive real innovation in your own development workflow.

Takeaways:

- Discover the power of Langchain4J in building AI-driven applications for Java developers.

- Learn how to create conversational interfaces that harness embeddings and vector databases for real-world solutions.

- Understand how this AI-powered chatbot can make waste sorting (and other use cases) easier and more accurate with natural language processing and fast retrieval.

By the end, you’ll see how AI can transform even the most mundane tasks—and how Java developers are perfectly positioned to lead this wave of intelligent applications.