If you're a regular user of Google Search, then you'll have noticed the appearance of "AI Overviews" at the top of search results.
These are AI-powered summaries which aim to provide quick, comprehensive answers to user queries by pulling information from multiple sources. You may even have firsthand experience of an "AI Overview" being sufficiently useful to answer your search query, to the point that you didn't need to click through to the third party websites listed in Google's regular search results.
The shift of Google Search from a web gateway to an "answer engine" has caused a stir in the online world, resulting in the coining of the informal term "Google Zero", which describes a hypothetical future where Google's AI Overviews provide users with direct answers, eliminating the need for clicks to third-party websites.
Public Sector websites often have a primary function of providing information to citizens. "AI Overview" type functionality is therefore likely to be highly beneficial to site visitors, helping them find information more quickly and with fewer, or even zero, clicks in the process. With this in mind, the next release of Council Platform will include a first iteration of "AI Overview" type functionality in the form of a "Chat to website" AI Assistant.
Without going into technical detail, this functionality works by putting all the published pages, and documents (including PDFs) of a site into a store that ChatGPT (or equivalent) can access. We then instruct ChatGPT (or equivalent) to only answer user queries based on the information it finds there, and to provide references to the pages and files which it used to formulate its answer. The restriction of only answering based on the information in the site's data store is important, as it prevents answers being sourced from the AI's pre-existing knowledge.
We say "ChatGPT (or equivalent)" above, as ChatGPT is the AI "Large Language Model" (or LLM for short) that most people will have heard of. There are lots of different LLMs, some are proprietary and run on cloud services, others you can host yourself. Our "Chat to website" solution defaults to using ChatGPT with data residency in the EU, but equally we could switch this out to run using an LLM of your choosing. The site's data remains in the UK, and chat queries to ChatGPT aren't stored anywhere once an answer has been returned. Clients will only need to provide their own LLM account API credentials for the functionality to be up and running.
One of the exciting things about the "Chat to website" AI Assistant is that it can parse and reference document files such as PDFs. PDFs have long been a pain point on websites, as they are an unwieldy data format, often with accessibility issues. The "Chat to website" AI Assistant helps surface information from them more readily.
We believe that with careful monitoring of user feedback, a "Chat to website" AI assistant can make finding information become a lot easier. It will be interesting to see whether all major informational websites pursue their own equivalent of "Google Zero" over time.
If you want to find out more, or implement the functionality on your own site, then please get in touch.