About Start Software

Start Software is an award-winning developer and leading publisher of asbestos software, systems for the legal services industry and more.

Want to know more about asbestos software Alpha Tracker? Alpha Tracker is the most used asbestos software in the UK, Australia & New Zealand with more than 60m items of asbestos data stored.

Our legal services software Alpha Legal helps will writers, accountants, solicitors, IFAs and estate agents to communicate securely with clients. Read about developments here on the blog.

Or need help with Alpha Anywhere or Alpha Transform projects or software development? You'll find useful info here.

Jack & Dan present at the Alpha Anywhere Dev Day 2025 - "Start - using AI"

Start Software's senior Alpha Anywhere developers Jack & Dan presented a 45-minute session at Alpha Software's annual Dev Day titled "Start - using AI" (see what we did there!).  The session introduced the new AI features in Alpha Anywhere, how to get started, and what we (at Start) use the features for.

Dan, their presentation, and Jack - ready to go

Jack introduced some of the different AI providers and models that are available and why we (generally) use OpenAI and ChatGPT.

We do like to advertise what we do! We are Alpha Software Specialists

Dan then covered off the basics of setting up a connection to a model in Alpha Anywhere and how to use some of the new XBasic functions in a couple of real-world examples.  

First, he showed how a complex prompt (itself written by AI) can be used to analyse images of properties - in our case, to judge whether asbestos may be present inside.  Second, he showed that AI can read PDFs and extract key data - even if the structure of the PDF isn't known in advance.

Jack finished up with a discussion about Ollama and why it is useful, and why you need to think about security and performance when working with AI.

If we can help you with AI or any of the Alpha Software products - Alpha Anywhere, Alpha Cloud and Alpha TransForm - get in touch!

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