Canada Gazette Digest
Testing AI in Real-World Applications
Generative AI is the biggest technological innovation in recent memory. It's obvious that it has tremendous potential, so we wanted to find out if it could be put to work in a practical, useful application. The result is Canada Gazette Digest (and even more).
Generative AI is the biggest innovation in the past couple of years. AI companies are continuously making impressive announcements about their abilities to reason about increasingly complex topics. You’ve probably tried an AI chatbot to see what the buzz is about.
After the initial novelty, you begin to wonder what else a generative AI can do. What’s a practical application that adds business value? At Avante IO, we asked the same question. Generative AI has obvious tremendous potential, but how could it be put to real use? The result is Canada Gazette Digest.
You can check out Canada Gazette Digest. It's a free service that Avante provides.
Our motivation
Analysts, decision makers, and other knowledge workers face the challenge of sipping from a firehose of complex information every day. The rate of information that’s generated outpaces what they’re able to review, forcing them to make difficult, risky decisions on what they believe they can ignore.
We looked for a project to move beyond novelty, to investigate the technical challenges of designing and building an effective, production-ready application for generative AI. We also wanted something of public interest and practical benefit.
We wanted this application to be genuinely useful for extracting useful insights from a large source of information. To truly demonstrate generative AI, we wanted an information source that contains complex, unstructured data, the kind that knowledge workers have to constantly wade through for their analysis and reporting. This ideal source should also be updated constantly, on the order of daily, weekly, or quarterly.
Getting a bigger picture
The result of our project is Canada Gazette Digest, a digital publication and journalistic initiative.
The source of information we chose is Canada Gazette, the Government of Canada’s official publication for announcements, regulatory changes, and new laws. It’s a large source of information published 3 times/week that spans all government departments and ministries. Topics are wide-ranging, from administrative errors to proposals for changes to wildlife protection policies. It’s also relatively unbiased, since the government is required to report this information consistently.
Text searching of the Canada Gazette is simple enough. The Government of Canada’s web page already provides this feature. Canada Gazette Digest takes a big leap further by applying generative AI to reveal both the broader strokes and finer connections of how government affairs affect all stakeholders, including the general public, market watchers, regulated organizations, and public policy makers.
Turn every stone, rapidly
Canada Gazette Digest distills each edition of the Canada Gazette into concise summaries of government updates and organizes them into topics. You don't have to know which text to search specifically, with Canada Gazette Digest you can navigate by topics, then dig deeper only when you feel the need.
It does this with remarkable speed, following issues in near real-time, often trailing by mere seconds. And it goes this with remarkable accuracy, thanks to the AI's ability to understand domain-specific terminology and concepts on diverse subjects.
The goal of Canada Gazette Digest is to keep you informed about the topics that interest you without being overwhelmed by the volume of content. It's easier to see relationships and trends between similar topics. You're also freed from potential biases, since each distillation by Canada Gazette Digest reflects the essence of its source content, offering you a clear, untainted perspective.
We're proud to have created a tool that's committed to fostering transparency and reinforcing democratic principles. We want Canada Gazette Digest to stand as a definitive resource for timely, unbiased, and insightful governance reporting.
How Canada Gazette Digest works
Canada Gazette Digest crawls the Government of Canada web site at every release of a new edition of the Canada Gazette. From there, our platform applies its AI analysis to generate highlights for every issue and Insights for each item in the issue. An Insight is a summary of the item in the source document. The AI also assigns a topic to the Insight and includes a link to the source.
Consili and CoreAI are the next steps
We showed our results to our industry partners in healthcare, insurance, legal, and public relations. They were impressed and conversations quickly turned to adapting this technology to their needs.
The outcomes of these conversations are Consili and CoreAI. Consili is a platform for crawling your own information sources for your own interests. CoreAI gives you fine-grained control over performance, cost, and privacy.
Consili
Consili is an AI-powered research assistant, continuously monitoring information channels to generate insights that are relevant and prioritized for an organization. Unburdened by tedious manual information processing, Consili lets organizations focus on taking that critical next step.
- Insights, like in Canada Gazette Digest, summarizes knowledge and shows connections among topics, always with references to source material.
- A chat assistant lets knowledge workers dig deeper and explore insights.
- Consili Triggers take action on specific conditions, with a human in the loop if needed.
CoreAI
For organizations looking for more customization and tighter integration with existing processes and IT infrastructure, CoreAI is a private LLM that turns large volumes of information into actionable , accurate knowledge.
- Generate summaries, extract knowledge, draft reports, reason about recent developments, integrate with existing workflows and platforms.
- Choose the level of security you need to meet regulatory standards and business obligations.
- Use your own infrastructure, whether self-hosted or third party hyperscaler.
- Choose your performance and cost. Ramp up infrastructure for rapid response, dial down resources off-hours to stay in budget.
Advancing Transparency with AI
We’re pleased with what we’ve achieved with Canada Gazette Digest. It complements the Canada Gazette's foundational objectives of enhancing transparency and fortifying democracy. Canada Gazette Digest makes crucial governance insights more accessible, contributing to a more informed and engaged citizenry.
And we’ve built technology that proves the potential of generative AI. With Consili and CoreAI we can apply generative AI in a way that’s robust, effective, and valuable.
Want to learn more? Try Canada Gazette Digest now. And if you have a specific project in mind, we're eager to collaborate and bring your vision to fruition.
🇨🇦 Built in Toronto