Finding trusted information should be easy. Meet Ask Jean.

I often hear this from women in the community. Something doesn’t feel right, but you don’t know what to call it. And how do you use a search engine when you don’t know the word? Our own website, for all the work that goes into it, is organised by condition, which is only useful if you know which condition you are looking for. That is the problem we’ve been trying to solve.

And, with the generous support of the Sisterhood Foundation, we’ve been working on a new way to start fixing this. Meet Ask Jean.

Ask Jean is a new AI tool on our website that lets you ask a health question in your own words and get an answer drawn from Jean Hailes’ own health information.

Many people are cautious about using AI for questions about your health and you’d be right to be cautious. Most AI tools draw on the whole internet, including sources nobody has checked.

Ask Jean does not do that. It answers only from Jean Hailes content, the same clinically reviewed information already on our website. It does not search the internet, and it does not invent answers from elsewhere.

If it does not have the information or can’t answer the question, it will tell you so.

Ask Jean does not diagnose anything, and it will not recommend a treatment or a medication. If you ask it something that needs a doctor, it will say so.

Ask Jean is not a substitute for seeing a health professional, and it is not for emergencies

Women’s health does not always exist in neat categories. Someone with heavy periods and migraines and fatigue currently has to work out for herself that those things might be connected, then find three separate pages on the website. Ask Jean can hold them together in one conversation.

The other reason is the is the one I started off with. Some women cannot name what they are experiencing. In our testing, someone typed “I feel like something is falling out.” Ask Jean gave her the word ‘prolapse’, explained what it is in plain language, and told her that seeking help early makes a difference. That is a woman who might not have booked an appointment with her doctor, because she did not know what to call it and was embarrassed to ask.

Before any work started, we developed an AI Governance Policy, grounded in Australia’s Voluntary AI Safety Standard. Every decision since has been based on that policy.

We have been testing Ask Jean since May 2026. The structured testing across clinical topics has been thorough and robust, with every claim cross-checked manually against our own content. We deliberately tested the difficult things: what happens when someone is distressed, when someone asks about medication, when someone tries to push the tool beyond what it should do.

For sensitive topics, including mental health and crisis situations, Ask Jean does not generate an answer at all. Those responses are written in advance and point to services like Lifeline and 1800RESPECT.

You do not need to log in or tell us who you are to use Ask Jean. We don’t ask for your name, your email or any personal details and there’s no need to type anything into Ask Jean that identifies you. Conversations are all encrypted, and access to the system is tightly restricted.

We are starting small, with Ask Jean available to a proportion of visitors to our website rather than everyone. We are not promoting it widely yet.

If you really want to try it out, though, you can use this secret link.

Starting Ask Jean out small is a deliberate choice. It lets us watch how the AI tool works with real questions; at a scale we can manage for maximum quality and safety. This way, we can make more changes, if we need to, before more people rely on it.

If you’re using Ask Jean and something does not seem right, please tell us. It is powered by AI, which means sometimes it will get things wrong, and we really want to know when it does. There is a feedback option in the tool itself, and all your feedback will us improve Ask Jean.