Beaker AI

Beaker is Lab Belay's built-in AI assistant. Access it from the ⚗️ Beaker icon in the sidebar. Beaker has read access to your organization's chemicals, equipment, labs, and tasks, as well as any lab manuals and reference documents that have been uploaded to your organization.

What Beaker can do

Find chemicals and equipment

Ask Beaker to search your inventory or the global catalog in plain language:

"Find all flammable solvents in Lab 3"

"What equipment is currently under maintenance?"

"Search for ethanol in the global catalog"

Beaker returns results with links to the relevant records, so you can jump directly to what you found.

Bulk import from spreadsheets

If you have an existing spreadsheet of chemicals or equipment, Beaker can process it for you:

1. Open Beaker and select Auto Chemical Upload or Auto Equipment Upload
2. Upload your CSV or paste the data
3. Beaker parses the file, matches items to the global catalog where possible, and shows you a preview
4. Review any flagged items (unrecognized chemicals, ambiguous entries)
5. Confirm to create all records at once

This typically takes a few minutes for a spreadsheet with hundreds of rows — compared to hours of manual entry.

Generate reports

Ask Beaker to create a safety report for a specific lab:

"Generate a safety report for the Synthesis Lab"

Beaker produces a PDF with the lab's chemical inventory, NFPA ratings, GHS classifications, and aggregate hazard data. The report is dated and ready to download.

Answer questions about your lab

Beaker can answer operational questions using your actual data:

"How many equipment items are currently marked as Under Maintenance?"

"What's the NFPA fire rating for our Biochemistry Lab?"

Reference documents and lab manuals

Beaker can answer questions grounded in documents uploaded to your organization — lab manuals, SOPs, instrument guides, or any other reference material.

"What does the SOP say about handling perchloric acid?"

"Summarize the maintenance procedure from the HPLC manual."

Beaker comes pre-loaded with nearly a hundred lab manuals covering common instruments and procedures. To make additional documents available, upload them from the Documents section. Once uploaded, Beaker will reference them when answering relevant questions.

How Beaker works

Beaker is powered by an AI model combined with direct access to your Lab Belay data. For inventory queries, it retrieves data directly from your records rather than generating answers from scratch, which reduces the likelihood of inaccuracies — but as with any AI system, responses may still contain errors. Always verify safety-critical information against the source records.

Conversations with Beaker are session-based and not retained between sessions.

Tips for effective use

• Always verify Beaker's answers — AI responses can contain inaccuracies. For anything safety-critical, confirm against the original records or source documents.
• Be specific about which lab, bench, or resource you mean — Beaker will ask for clarification if it's ambiguous
• For bulk imports, clean up your spreadsheet headers before uploading (column names like "Chemical Name" and "CAS Number" are recognized automatically)
• If a result isn't what you expected, rephrase your request or add more context
• Beaker can hand off directly to Lab Belay forms — for example, if you ask it to add a chemical, it can pre-fill the form with the data it found