You don’t yet know who you will vote for in the coming elections? Ask for advice on voting from Government Robot, a chatbot developed by Leuven-based company Data Minded to make government documents available in just a few seconds.

On June 9th we will go to the polls again for the federal, Flemish and European elections. To make an informed decision, consider the extent to which current ministers have fulfilled their election promises. Finding this information yourself requires combing through tens of thousands of government documents. Leuven Data Minded launches the free chatbot “Government Robot” to help the Flemish population neutrally prepare for the upcoming elections.

The chatbot can search all government documents from 2019 in a few seconds in search of answers about the policies of the current Flemish government. You can use the chat interface to view an overview of the measures taken per policy area or ask specific questions.

The government robot is designed to remain as neutral as possible: the chatbot does not take a position on whether certain political decisions were positive or not. If you ask the chatbot for its opinion, you will get the political answer “As an assistant, I have no personal opinion.”

Reducing the gap between politicians and citizens

The motivation behind the development of Government Robot is twofold. On the one hand, Data Minded wants to offer Flemish people a neutral response to slogans on social media, thus reducing the gap between citizens and government decisions. On the other hand, the chatbot shows that AI can serve the further development of our society instead of AI taking over jobs or promoting negative topics such as plagiarism.

Kris Peeters, CEO of Data Minded (not to be confused with the ex-CD&V politician of the same name), explains the logic behind the application: “The chatbot opens via Get Augmented Generation the door to an in-depth and transparent analysis of what the government has really done. All government decisions are initially stored in a vector database. Then, when a user asks the Government Robot a question about a topic, it finds the government decisions most related to that topic and briefly summarizes the decisions using an LLM. The robot also adds a reference to the original documents so users can check the answers themselves.”

The government robot is free and available online. Data Minded also makes the code available via GitHub.