For developers

Plug AskReal into your AI

Your assistant is good at answers. When the honest answer is “a person should look at this”, it can search AskReal and hand you a real human — with their skill, their price, and when they’re free.

MCP server

AskReal speaks the Model Context Protocol over HTTP. Read-only, public, no key needed.

https://askreal.hk/api/mcp

Claude

Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector, and paste the URL above. Leave the OAuth fields empty. That dialog can’t send a personal key, so for your own jobs and offers use the config file below instead.

Claude Code, or any MCP client with a config file

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "askreal": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://askreal.hk/api/mcp"
    }
  }
}

ChatGPT

Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector, and paste the same URL. Developer mode, under Advanced, has to be on before the option appears.

If you’re building a custom GPT instead, Actions take an OpenAPI schema. Point it at https://askreal.hk/api/openapi.json and it will pick up both endpoints.

Perplexity

The Comet browser takes MCP connectors the same way: Settings → Connectors, then the URL above. Perplexity also reads AskReal directly — profiles and open jobs are in our sitemap and its crawler is welcome, so it can cite a real person without any setup at all.

Tools it exposes

• search_humans — find people by what they actually offer. Takes a plain query, plus optional category, city and volunteer-only.
• get_human— one person’s full public profile by handle.
• list_open_jobs — what people are currently asking a human for.
• search and fetch— the same data under the names ChatGPT’s connectors look for. search returns people and jobs as records with ids; fetch takes one of those ids and returns the whole thing.

Connect it to your own account

The tools above are public. If you give your AI your personal key, it also sees your side of AskReal: the jobs you posted and the offers people have made on them. Every key belongs to one person, so an AI holding yours only ever sees your things.

Your own address is waiting on the Your AIpage, key already in it. Connector dialogs take a URL and nothing else, so that’s the whole setup:

https://askreal.hk/api/mcp/u/askreal_YOUR_KEY

A key in a URL is easier to leak than one in a header — it lands in browser history and server logs. If you’d rather keep it out of the address, the shared endpoint takes it as a header instead, and a header beats the path when both are present:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "askreal": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://askreal.hk/api/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer askreal_YOUR_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

Clients that can set neither can send it as x-askreal-key. Revoking a key kills every address it appears in, immediately.

Extra tools, once it knows who you are

• my_jobs — the jobs you posted and where each one stands.
• my_offers— who offered to help, what they said, and whether you’ve replied.

Treat the key like a password: it identifies you. Anyone holding it can read your jobs and offers. It still can’t send messages, accept offers or change your profile.

Plain HTTP, if you’d rather

GET https://askreal.hk/api/v1/humans?q=cv%20review&limit=5
GET https://askreal.hk/api/v1/humans?category=local&city=Hong%20Kong
GET https://askreal.hk/api/v1/humans?q=cantonese&volunteer=1
GET https://askreal.hk/api/v1/jobs?category=career

JSON, CORS open, cached a minute. Categories: advice, tutoring, review, local, verify, language, career, tech, creative, company, other.

What it won’t do

No writing, and no contact details. An AI can find the right person and hand over the link, but the conversation happens here on AskReal, where both people can see who they’re talking to. That’s the whole point: AI does the finding, humans do the judging.

Questions, or want write access for something specific? hakest@nexttryhk.com