About Ask the Princess
Converse with the princess
With Ask the Princess, you can, on your own or together with others, ask questions and gain deeper insight into Princess, later Queen of Sweden, Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotta, and life at the royal court. You can ask the Princess about major and minor events, about joy and sorrow, about power struggles and gossip!
The Ask the Princess AI chatbot is a web-based application that works on smartphones. It generates its answers based on sources including Princess Charlotta’s diaries. The chatbot can understand and respond in Swedish, English, and French.
We hope that Ask the Princess will add enjoyment and value to your visit to the Royal Armoury. After trying it, we would appreciate your feedback through the survey available on the Ask the Princess homepage.
Where does Ask the Princess get its answers?
Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotta kept a diary for 42 years of her life, from 1775 to 1817. Using AI technology, your questions are matched with what Princess Charlotta wrote in her diaries, and an answer is generated based on that material.
The diary texts, which form the main part of the Ask the Princess knowledge base, were compiled, translated into Swedish, and first published in book form in 1902. The diaries comprise 5,130 pages of text and are available in their entirety through the Swedish Literature Bank (Litteraturbanken).
The chatbot’s knowledge base is limited to information that we at the National Historical Museums of Sweden (SHM) manage and curate. The chatbot does not retrieve answers from the internet, which reduces the risk of it generating inaccurate or fabricated responses.
About SHM’s AI chatbot pilot project
Ask the Princess is part of a pilot project in which the National Historical Museums of Sweden (SHM) are exploring whether an AI-driven, conversational visitor experience in exhibitions can make museum visits more engaging and rewarding.
The first stage of the project involved testing an alchemy-focused chatbot called Ask the Alchemist, which accompanied the exhibition Alchemy at Skokloster Castle during the summer of 2026. The next stage enables visitors to the exhibition In Royal Service at the Royal Armoury to ask questions directly to a historical figure.
The interactive solution is being developed by SHM in collaboration with the French company Ask Mona.
Why is SHM doing this?
SHM wants to explore whether chatbot technology can increase visitor engagement and improve learning by allowing visitors to explore a subject in a new way. Can this technology provide a more personalized experience, adapting to visitors’ individual needs regardless of language or accessibility requirements?
This initiative is not intended to replace human guides or change the way exhibitions are created. Rather, we want to investigate whether and how AI can add value to the museum experience.
Isn’t AI bad for the environment?
The type of AI used in this project consumes less energy because it relies on a limited and carefully curated knowledge base. However, we are aware that AI solutions in general can be energy-intensive. As part of our evaluation, we will weigh environmental impact against other benefits when deciding on the future use of this type of AI technology.