“When I was at Sea, a Machinery Operations Manual was 300 pages. Now they’re 600, and growing.”

I sat across the table from a Head of Technical for a Tanker operator, as he described his experience of the documentation load he had to deal with when he was sailing.

What we had shown him had struck an emotional chord.

He knew what that frustration felt like.

If you have been following Greywing and our developments in AI you might be aware of our tools Ocean Oracle and Proteus, (rebranded from SeaGPT).

The easy way to differentiate between them is that Proteus makes your data conversational (VMS, Crewing, PMS, Technical & Pre-Fixture data, for example), and Ocean Oracle enables you to converse with complex PDFs.

One for data.

One for documents.

What we love about Proteus and Ocean Oracle, is that there is minimal onboarding load. When all you need to do is ask questions, it is pretty easy to start using Proteus and Ocean Oracle.

But which one is better? This is a hard question to answer!

The truth is, it depends on what you need. Day to day, Proteus delivers clear-cut insights on the data you need to make decisions.

If you need to find an Indian 2nd Engineer with a readiness date this week, holding a US Visa - you can ask Proteus.

Unsure of what flight availability is like, need advice on visa requirements, need to check what crew on a forthcoming crew change have out-of-date documentation - you can just ask.

Day-to-day Proteus delivers actionable insights to give you 30-90 mins back each day.

Ocean Oracle is a little bit different.

So far our experience is that crew don’t spend as much time reading manuals to stay up to date as often as they might.

With internet onboard, there is more competition for their attention. A Facetime call with their daughter, Netflix staying up to date on Facebook - all of these pastimes diminish the amount of time and the desire to keep up to date with manuals.

That is where Ocean Oracle is a game changer. Everyone we have spoken to who has been to sea knows the pain of running through complex manuals to solve problems. And just about everyone in a shipping company has complex and lengthy documentation to keep up to date with.

The way people use Ocean Oracle is on more of an ad hoc basis, but they’re using it around time-pressure situations. Whether referring to a cargo or machinery operations manual, they are working against the clock and need to extract information quickly. Vessel operations, depend on it.

So when I think about whether Ocean Oracle or Proteus is the best tool out there, I can’t get to a decision on that.

What I can get to a definite outcome on, is that people like Proteus, its great and its a game changer.

But, when they see Ocean Oracle, the first words out of their mouth are…

”I wish I had this when I was at sea.”