CincyMuse: Cincinnati Museum Center | Artificial Intelligence Cloud Innovation Center

Overview

The Arizona State University Artificial Intelligence Cloud Innovation Center, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), collaborated with Cincinnati Museum Center to conceptualize CincyMuse—an AI-powered digital guide designed to enhance guest, donor, and community engagement. CincyMuse serves as a friendly virtual assistant that helps visitors explore exhibits, plan visits, access digital collections, discover events, and connect with ways to support the Museum’s mission. By integrating content from cincymuseum.org, the digital collections API, supportcmc.org, customer service materials, event feeds, and additional curated resources, the chatbot provides real-time, citation-backed responses in both English and Spanish.

Problem

Cincinnati Museum Center serves a diverse audience including guests, donors, community members, staff, and volunteers. Visitors often have questions about exhibits, events, tickets, memberships, OMNIMAX showtimes, and digital collections. Donors seek information about philanthropy and ways to support the organization. Staff and volunteers require accurate customer service materials to provide timely responses. Information is distributed across multiple websites, digital collections portals, event feeds, and customer service PDFs, making it difficult to provide consistent, centralized answers. Additionally, event schedules and service documentation require periodic updates, including the ability to remove outdated PDFs and ingest new materials seamlessly.

Student Spotlight

The AI CIC is powered by ASU Student Workers. The following students were assigned to this project to develop this open-source solution in partnership with the AWS and ASU mentor team.

Experience: Building the Cincinnati Museum Chatbot has been an incredibly fulfilling project, focused on making art and history more accessible through AI. We developed an intelligent concierge that handles everything from logistical questions, like opening hours and donation processes, to deep-dives into specific artifacts for enthusiasts. The system leverages Amazon Nova Lite 2 and AWS Knowledge Bases to ensure responses are accurate and grounded in the museum’s unique collection. To round out the solution, we engineered an Admin Dashboard to track KPIs and visualize user engagement.

Experience: Building the Cincinnati Museum Chatbot was a very special experience, as it was my first project at the Cloud Innovation Center. Finding niche art and artifacts on websites with of a lot information can be challenging, which inspired us to develop an intelligent chatbot that streamlines the search process. The chatbot not only answers user questions but also provides credible sources and images, encouraging visitors to explore and learn more on their own.

Everyone enjoys engaging with conversational AI, and it was incredibly fulfilling to build something with such meaningful impact, especially given the large number of visitors the Cincinnati Museum attracts. One of my biggest takeaways from this project was the opportunity to work extensively with the AWS suite for the first time.

Experience: Creating the Cincinnati Museum Chatbot has been an incredibly meaningful experience in my role as a UX Designer. I focused on designing an intuitive and accessible interface that helps visitors quickly find information—whether they’re looking for museum hours, donation details, or deeper insights into specific artifacts. My goal was to reduce friction and make exploring art and history feel seamless through conversational AI.

I ensured the chatbot experience was clear, visually engaging, and easy to navigate across devices. From structuring conversation flows and refining prompt clarity to designing a clean, scalable interface, I worked to balance functionality with warmth so the chatbot feels helpful, not overwhelming.

Experience: Designing the CincyMuse Chatbot as a UX designer on the team was a deeply rewarding challenge where I translated the museum’s educational mission into a conversational digital experience. I focused on crafting a bilingual interface that feels welcoming, structured, and effortless to navigate, ensuring both English and Spanish users could move seamlessly between exhibits, tickets, collections, and membership information. I also considered the broader ecosystem by shaping feedback loops and admin-facing insights to support continuous improvement. My goal was to create a digital guide that feels organized yet human, informative yet inviting, turning complex museum content into an intuitive, engaging journey.

Approach

The CIC team built a serverless RAG chatbot on AWS with three main flows: Visitor Chat, Admin Dashboard, and Knowledge Ingestion.

AI/RAG: Bedrock Knowledge Base with Nova Lite for generation and Nova Multimodal Embeddings; OpenSearch Serverless for vector storage with hybrid search
Chat streaming: Lambda with FastAPI and Lambda Web Adapter streams responses via SSE through API Gateway
Content ingestion: S3 for PDFs, images, and documents; Bedrock Data Automation for multimodal parsing; web crawler for cincymuseum.org, supportcmc.org, events, and podcasts
Frontend: Next.js 14 on Amplify with SSR delivers bilingual (English/Spanish) responses with source citations and quick action buttons
Admin & analytics: Cognito-authenticated APIs with Admin API Lambda surface conversation logs, feedback, and user data from DynamoDB
Infrastructure: AWS CDK deploys fully serverless architecture with Lambda (Python 3.13), DynamoDB with GSIs, and S3 for scalability and cost-efficiency

Industry Impact and Problem Solving

CincyMuse is designed to improve visitor experience by centralizing information across collections, events, ticketing, and philanthropy into a single digital guide. The solution supports guests by providing quick, reliable answers; assists donors by surfacing ways to contribute; and offers staff and volunteers an additional support tool. By delivering citation-backed responses and structured fallback messaging, CincyMuse promotes accuracy, trust, and accessibility while reducing operational burden on guest services teams.

"Cincinnati Museum Center had the privilege of collaborating with AWS and the ASU AI Cloud Innovation Center through the Chatbot-a-Thon initiative. This innovative effort brings together emerging talent and cutting-edge technology to help organizations like ours better connect with the communities we serve. The resulting digital guide, CincyMuse, will enhance access to our museums and collections, including more than six million historic objects, scientific specimens, photographs, moving images, documents, and other educational resources. This collaboration has the potential to improve how guests discover and engage with Cincinnati Museum Center and, we hope, lays the foundation for a more accessible and engaging digital experience that inspires curiosity and learning for audiences of all ages."

Jason Perkins | Vice President of Technology | Cincinnati Museum Center & National Underground Railroad Freedom Center

Potential for Wider Application

This serverless RAG chatbot architecture can be adapted across cultural institutions (libraries, galleries, historical sites), healthcare (patient education portals, medical knowledge bases), education (campus information, admissions support), government services (public information portals, benefits assistance), retail and hospitality (product information, customer service), corporate environments (internal documentation, onboarding, HR support), and tourism (destination information, itinerary planning). The serverless design, multilingual capabilities, streaming responses, citation transparency, and analytics dashboard make it suitable for any organization democratizing access to complex information through conversational AI.

Next Steps

Following the initial release of CincyMuse to our 25,000 members, we will review user feedback and refine the chatbot’s datasets and responses. After this iteration, we plan to expand access to the hundreds of thousands of visitors who use our public website each year.

In future phases, we hope to explore personalized experiences for members and frequent visitors. This could allow individuals to access curated content while also guiding CincyMuse to tailor responses based on their interests, creating a more individualized digital assistant experience.

Ultimately, we aim to share our approach and lessons learned with partner institutions as part of a broader effort to improve collections discovery and content search across cultural organizations.

About the ASU CIC

The ASU Artificial Intelligence Cloud Innovation Center (AI CIC), powered by AWS, is a no-cost design thinking and rapid prototyping shop dedicated to bridging the digital divide and driving innovation in the nonprofit, healthcare, education, and government sectors. Our expert team harnesses Amazon’s pioneering approach to dive deep into high-priority pain points, meticulously define challenges, and craft strategic solutions. We collaborate with AWS solutions architects and talented student workers to develop tailored prototypes showcasing how advanced technology can tackle operational and mission-related challenges. Discover how we use technology to drive innovation by visiting ASU AI CIC or contacting [email protected].

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