Northeastern’s CivicConnect Team Builds Congressional Office Chatbot Prototype
POPVOX Foundation commends the “CivicConnect” student team from Northeastern University's Burnes Center for Social Change on the creation of what we believe to be the first Congressional office chatbot prototype, leveraging OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. We were honored to advise the team and are excited to learn from and build on their work.
The students (Ala’a Tamam, Arjun Bhat, Isha Chadalavada, Parth Kabra, and Rohit Kaushik) — under the direction of Dan Jackson, Director of NU Law Lab, and Professor Beth Noveck, with mentoring from the POPVOX Foundation team — studied the current state of constituent correspondence in Congressional offices. Through their interviews with staff, constituent management system providers, and Ala’a’s experience working as an intern in a district office, the students identified problems with constituent correspondence processes that will be exacerbated by an increase in AI-generated messages. They then brainstormed potential solutions and decided that a chatbot would allow for a more interactive experience for constituents and helpful analytics for Congressional offices.
The team developed CivicConnect, an AI-powered chatbot using OpenAI’s technology, aimed at improving constituent-representative engagement. This chatbot is designed to handle basic inquiries and summarize conversations for staffers. Key features include:
Learning Capability: It can load and learn from office-specific documents, such as talking points and voting records, to provide responses aligned with the representative's policies.
Customization: The chatbot is fully customizable to suit the specific needs of different congressional offices.
Efficiency and Responsiveness: It aims to streamline communication, reduce response times, and handle large volumes of correspondence more efficiently.
Open Source Code: The students made their code available on GitHub, allowing for future enhancements and adoption by other projects.
We at POPVOX Foundation are proud to have supported this initiative and thank AI4Impact students for their outstanding work. We are also grateful to Rep. Seth Moulton’s [D, MA] office for their collaboration.
