AI assistant compares party proposals

Two students from the University of Porto have launched an assistant based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), called Vota AI, to help citizens explore and compare the proposals of the parties running in the legislative elections on May 18.

It was with the aim of “promoting political literacy” that Filipe Barros and João Barão developed Vota AI, an online platform that aims to make political information “more accessible”, the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto (FCUP) revealed this Friday.

The assistant was developed as part of the degree in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science (LIACD) at FCUP and the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP). Quoted in the press release, Filipe Barros states that the objective is to “show that Artificial Intelligence can — and should — be used to bring people closer to politics”. “Not as a substitute for critical thinking, but as a bridge between the complexity of electoral programs and the right of each citizen to decide based on clear information”, he adds.

Users can freely ask the assistant questions on topics such as housing, health, taxes or education, receiving answers “based on the parties’ proposals, based on official programs”. The platform was developed with Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and state-of-the-art language models, “ensuring that the answers are clear, contextualized and verifiable”.

“This distinguishing feature helps to minimize possible misinterpretations or biases, although, like any linguistic model, the system’s behavior can be influenced by the formulation of questions asked by users,” the students explain. The platform is free and available online.

“The platform is and will always be free, precisely because we believe that access to political information should not depend on those who can pay for it”, assures João Barão, adding that the students’ objective is to reach “all people, throughout the country, regardless of age, education or time available to read dozens of pages of proposals”.

“We believe that informed voting is an essential pillar of democracy, and Vota AI is our contribution to making this ideal closer to reality,” he says.

Vota AI was developed at the Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Laboratory of the University of Porto and supervised by professors Luís Paulo Reis and André Restivo, from FEUP.