The TAI Protocol - an overview

An overview. This paper describes the shape of the TAI protocol and the ideas behind it — enough to understand what TAI is, how it addresses services, and why it is built the way it is. It is an orientation, not the full wire specification.

1. What TAI is (and is not)

TAI — Talk AI — is a parallel resolution and transport stack for intent-native services. A user expresses what they want; a trusted provider answers with structured data blocks, not an HTML page. A browser renders those blocks.

TAI answers a different question than DNS and the web:

DNS asks:  Where is this domain hosted?
TAI asks:  What does the user want, who offers it, can I trust them,
           and what do I send and get back?

TAI is not a replacement for the web. The traditional web keeps working, and a TAI browser speaks both. TAI is a parallel system for a class of interaction the web was never designed for: intent-driven, schema-typed, provider-answered, registry-trusted.

The scheme is tai://. TLS is the transport the reference stack happens to use; it is never the protocol's identity.

2. The wire, from a builder's chair

A TAI service does two things on port 710:

• GET / returns a small JSON document — who the provider is and what they can answer.
• POST / takes a natural-language request and returns a structured answer: an ordered list of typed blocks (text, links, and richer types the browser knows how to render).

There is no page to design and no markup crossing the wire — only structured JSON. The provider decides what to say; the browser decides how to show it. Presentation is the browser's job; being the authoritative, credited source is the provider's.

TAI does not require artificial intelligence to participate. The reference model is deterministic — a request maps to an answer the provider already has. A language model is an option a provider can add later, not a cost of entry.

3. Addressing — category-first, slash-native

The one structural separator is the slash /, at every level. The dot is a DNS-era separator; TAI does not use it structurally. Category leads the address — it behaves like a top-level domain, but first instead of last.

DNS  (old):   grocery.walmart.com          dots; org suffix last
TAI  (this):  tai://shopping/walmart        slashes; category first

The grammar is small:

tai://<category>                 → the category page
tai://<category>/<name>          → a specific provider in that category
tai://<category>/<name>/<path>…  → an optional, provider-defined sub-path

• <category> is a member of a controlled, finite set (see §4).
• <name> is the provider's chosen brand within that category — lowercase letters, digits, and hyphens.
• Sub-paths are optional; a provider can be a bare tai://<category>/<name>.

Because the key is (category, name) and not the name alone, the same name can be held once per category by different owners — tai://shopping/atlas and tai://travel/atlas are two distinct services. A category resets the namespace instead of forcing one global land-grab, which means far more organizations can hold the name they actually want.

Two doors to one service

• The registry door (tai://shopping/walmart) resolves through a signed registry record — the trusted, discoverable path.
• The direct-host door (tai://walmart.com) lets a browser resolve an existing DNS host and connect directly, bypassing the registry — untrusted convenience for hosts that predate their TAI adoption.

Both land at the same endpoint. A site that adopts TAI keeps its identity: walmart.com, if it offers TAI, is the very service tai://shopping/walmart reaches.

4. Categories — controlled now, community-governed later

Categories answer exactly one question — "what domain of need." Anything about how you get it or how you pay (delivery, subscription, and so on) is a facet within a category, never a category of its own. That single-axis rule keeps the set clean.

At launch the set is controlled and finite — a curated list a registrant picks from, not one they invent. As the community around TAI grows, category creation opens to community governance; the registry stops being the sole minter. The starter set spans everyday domains of need — shopping, food, finance, health, professional services, travel, news, and technology — each with a recommended (not required) set of descriptive facets.

5. Trust and transport — no DNS on the trusted path

The registry record for a provider carries its IP address, a TLS routing label, and an ed25519 public-key fingerprint. A client connects straight to the address on port 710 over modern TLS and verifies the provider's key against the signed record — so the trusted path makes no DNS request at all. Identity is anchored in the signed registry, not in a certificate authority and not in the domain name system.

This is a defining property, not a tuning knob: simpler than DNS. A service is one registration — no domain purchase, no nameservers, no zone to babysit — and it points a human-friendly name at any address, IPv4 or IPv6, so IPv6-only services are first-class with no gymnastics.

6. The principles it is built on

A protocol is also a set of commitments. These are the ones TAI holds:

• The registry never ranks. Results are unranked and neutral, narrowed only by what the user types. No one can pay to change what a neutral user sees. Labeled, order-neutral promotion may exist inside a provider's own answer, but it never reorders neutral results.
• A name obligates a real service. A (category, name) must run a real, reachable TAI service; a periodic liveness check enforces it. The namespace is for services people use, not for squatting.
• The browser owns the surface. Only structured JSON crosses the wire — no HTML, no JavaScript, no pixels, no external resources. The browser controls rendering, so providers can't break out of the canvas, and there is nothing hostile to track or block.
• Data is held in trust. What the registry collects to confirm ownership and prevent abuse is the minimum needed for that purpose — protected, and never used to rank, market, profile, or sell.

7. Where it's going

TAI is an open protocol with a deliberately small center. The reference browser is Tairavia; the reference registry is getai.click; the reference conversion tool is site2tai. The direction of travel is toward many authorities and community governance — the signed, mirrorable record format is built for that future. What stays constant through every step are the commitments in §6.

You can be a live, credited, trusted participant today with a single registration and a small service on port 710 — and grow from deterministic answers to intelligent ones without ever rewriting what you started with.