In a collaboration with the gardening app Fryd, Hort2thefuture has employed a novel Large Language Model (LLM) and chatbot user interface to better understand the motivations, understandings, and practices of gardeners. The model analyses over 60,000 anonymised posts and comments from gardeners on the Fryd app’s community forums (from January 2024 to January 2025). Xinyi Wang, a PhD student, developed the model with guidance from Arijit De and Atanu Dey, and her supervisors at Newcastle University.
This innovative model helps to understand gardeners’ motivations, soil literacy, and practices. It will be used to help design more effective interventions to promote sustainable gardening practices. Additionally, digital marketers can use it to understand what content achieves the highest user engagement, enabling companies to improve their marketing to gardeners.
How the Chatbot Works
The chatbot functions by using a customised LLM-Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline that can respond to users’ queries about the forum data in natural language. The pipeline begins with a RAG workflow that encodes the user query and filters out the most semantically relevant information from a vector database. In this database, each post or comment is embedded as a numerical value. The retrieved values are then sent to the Llama-3 model as context, which the model uses to generate its response to the user’s query. The chatbot is delivered using a Streamlit interface, with filters for language and time periods.
Key insights from the research
Xinyi Wang notes, “Through the model, we are better able to understand gardeners’ soil literacy. We find that gardeners rarely engage in soil-related conversations, and comments often exhibit basic to low understanding of soil literacy. Users are most motivated to use the Fryd app because of the community, which provides a respectful environment for sharing personal experiences and knowledge exchange with like-minded gardeners.”
Steffen Abel, Co-Founder and CTO at Fryd, commented, “Working with the Hort2thefuture project on the model is generating useful insights regarding how to help gardeners adopt more sustainable practices. The model is helping us understand what kinds of posts generate the most engagement and what content is most effective.”
About Fryd
The Fryd app is an advisory and planning tool for gardeners focusing on fruit and vegetables. It incorporates a community forum and has approximately 10,000 monthly active users across both its English and German language versions.