iCongress

What it does

iCongress is a mobile app that seeks to improve civic literacy by making it easier for online Americans read and follow legislation from Congress. Built with Flutter, Firebase, the Congress.gov API, and the Gemini, iCongress summarizes congressional bills using Gemini and gives insights into the bill's sponsors, where in the legislative process the bill is, when the latest action was taken on it, how Congress is voting on the bill, how the user’s congress members voted, and what policy area the bill pertains to. To address any questions users may have about a bill, each bill also has a Gemini-powered Q&A chatbot.

Users can also change their preferred language, level of summary, and policy interests to make the app more suited to them. Lastly, they can search for bills stored on our Cloud Firestore database.

We utilize the Gemini 1.5 flash model in iCongress for three primary purposes. First, to generate three summaries for each congressional bill that vary in depth. To do so, we feed the model the full bill text and gave it a prompt that detailed the depth of each summary level, a potential user persona for each level and instructions to ensure there is no political bias in the summaries. To ensure that we stay true to the bill text, the temperature of model was set to 0.2. Second, to translate these summaries to a user’s preferred language. Third, in a chatbot that utilizes a given bill’s text to answer the user’s questions in a concise manner.