Gov Notes

What it does

Gov Notes is a website that allows users to quickly understand lengthy government meetings. Users can search for specific committees or topics where they will eventually be taken to a hearing summary page. This page allows the user to scan for key points which they can click on to view the portion of the video where that key point is discussed. In addition, this page contains a Gemini-powered chat where the user can ask follow up questions about the video to dive deeper. This chat enables users to ask when their current topic was discussed and be presented a direct link into the video.

From a technical perspective, Gov Notes analyzes government hearing transcripts using Gemini’s generate_content and embed_content APIs as well as a Postgres PgVector DB for RAG. During pre-processing, each generated key point is validated using RAG to ensure there exists a 30 second snippet of transcript text that serves as “evidence”, dropping key points that fail validation to avoid spreading misinformation. The chat feature uses Gemini’s “function calling” and a similar RAG process to hook into the chat, handling all responses for direct timestamps in the video where the current chat topic was discussed. Sitewide search is implemented using a semantic similarity vector search over a weighted combination of all key points and transcript snippets. Performant search over hundreds of thousands of vectors is the result of carefully crafted SQL and an HNSW index over the vectors.