What if accessing reliable information about Europe was as simple as typing a question?
This is the idea behind ChatEurope, the first free interactive chatbot dedicated entirely to European news. Launched by a consortium of 15 media organizations and led by Agence France-Presse, the project brings together journalists, technologists, and innovation partners across the continent.
At its core, ChatEurope combines a collaborative news platform, a conversational chatbot, and coordinated distribution channels to make European affairs more accessible, interactive, and trustworthy. By merging collaboration software with a generative AI interface, it offers a new way for citizens to explore topics through clear, unbiased, and multilingual answers. What is more, you can access the platform both on desktop and mobile. This supports the way people consume media nowadays.
Really encouraging to see initiatives like #ChatEurope leading the way. This is exactly the kind of responsible AI we need, transparent, fact-checked, and built to inform.\* \\\*LinkedIn user
Why a project like ChatEurope emerged
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European media and institutions are facing a shared challenge: how to remain relevant and trustworthy when the way people consume news is rapidly evolving.
On one hand, traditional media sees declining engagement, news avoidance, and the spread of disinformation. On the other hand, European topics are often perceived as complex and distant. This leads to a disconnection between citizens and institutions.
At the same time, expectations have shifted. Audiences increasingly look for interactive and easy-to-understand information. That’s why they often turn to conversational tools rather than traditional articles.
ChatEurope was created to bridge this gap. Its ambition is simple yet impactful: provide accessible, reliable, and engaging information about Europe, while leveraging generative AI to rethink how news is consumed. The project also builds on an earlier European initiative, i.e. European Data News Hub (EDNH), while introducing a more interactive layer.
While it is co-funded by the European Commission, ChatEurope operates with complete editorial independence, ensuring its credibility.
All content is drawn from a curated database of verified news articles from trusted European newsrooms. The chatbot clearly cites the relevant journalistic sources in every response, enabling users to verify the information.
From scattered news to a single source of truth platform
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Valuable information about European affairs already exists, but it’s generally scattered. Content is distributed across multiple media outlets, often siloed by language or geography. Large datasets from previous EU-funded projects remained underused, and accessing verified information requires time, effort, and prior knowledge.
To address this, the ChatEurope project defined a clear set of needs:
✅ A central platform aggregating content from multiple European media trusted sources
✅ Collaborative editorial workflows, including shared calendars and coordinated publication planning
✅ The integration of a free conversational chatbot connected to a curated and verifiable content base that delivers answers in multiple formats and languages
✅ A robust Content Management System (CMS) for publishing, managing, and curating content in various formats
✅ Support for multilingual publishing (7 languages and soon more), with integrated AI-powered, real-time translations
✅ Responsive design, clear navigation, metadata tagging for searchability, and the potential for embedding external tools (i.e. live feeds)
✅ Implementation of technical SEO best practices, including structured data, sitemaps, optimized URLs, mobile-friendliness, and performance optimization
✅ Reuse and integration of large existing archives from the previous EU-funded project, EDNH (~~5.1 million words)
XWiki had already technically architected EDNH, and its European-origin technology made it a natural fit as the project’s technical partner.
Why collaboration software was essential
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Coordinating more than a dozen media organizations across countries is no easy feat. Each partner brings its own editorial processes, formats, and audiences. Collaboration software became the backbone of the project.
It enabled partners to:
#1 Work within shared editorial workflows
#2 Plan and coordinate publications
#3 Structure and enrich content with metadata
#4 Reuse and adapt content across formats and languages
This is where XWiki played a central role. Already behind the EDNH platform, XWiki represented a proven, flexible foundation aligned with the project’s European and open-source values. It provided a system designed for collaboration, structure, and reuse, that's cost-efficient and scalable.
XWiki was a natural partner for ChatEurope. Their experience in the development of the previous EDNH project allowed us to avoid starting from scratch and contributed to cost efficiency when setting up our website. As a provider active in open-source development and a defender of European technological sovereignty, XWiki already had strong experience with European projects and serves as a technological partner for the DE FACTO, BROD, and ADMO hubs. Mathieu Gorse, Chief Editor and Project Lead Responsible in ChatEurope (AFP)
Building ChatEurope with collaboration software and chatbot integration
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Creating ChatEurope ultimately resulted in a platform where collaboration software and generative AI are deeply interconnected. At its core is a CMS developed by XWiki, acting as the central hub for content aggregation, editorial collaboration, and publishing. The design of the website was done by Détroit agency.
On top of this foundation sits the conversational layer. The chatbot, developed by the Romanian company Druid AI and powered by the French startup Mistral AI, connects directly to a curated database of verified content. Deutsche Welle also contributes media processing through the integration of plain X for text, and soon audio and video translation.
XWiki provided:
✅ Hosting, setup, and maintenance of the platform on XWiki Cloud (hosted in France through OVHcloud)
✅ Import and indexing of large content archives from EDNH
✅ A CMS enabling partners to upload, manage, tag, and curate content across formats (text, video, audio, graphics, data visualizations)
✅ Creation of a back office for managing the editorial aspects of home and pillar pages
✅ Native multilingual support with AI-powered translations via plain X, optimized per language pair
✅ Druid AI chatbot integration, connected to curated archives and datasets
✅ Dedicated APIs exposing structured content to Druid AI for feeding and improving the conversational model
✅ Integration of the Calendar Application (Pro) to support collaborative editorial planning
✅ Daily news alerts, uploaded and managed collaboratively by project partners
✅ Responsive front end, structured navigation for 4 content pillars, metadata tagging, and search for discoverability
✅ Technical SEO setup to ensure discoverability and performance
Key takeaways
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ChatEurope is changing how people access European news, making it as simple as asking a question. Instead of navigating complex articles, users get clear, sourced answers in their own language. Today, the platform reaches users in up to 95 countries, with almost 9,000 unique page views per month.
Behind this experience is XWiki, centralizing millions of words of multilingual content and enabling seamless collaboration across partners. It provides the foundation that makes both scale and reliability possible.
ChatEurope is proof that with the right collaboration software and technology partners, media organizations can innovate with AI while staying grounded in trusted journalism.