The media brief generator allows users to automatically obtain an overview of recent social media posts and mainstream media articles, identifying trends, priority issues and public sentiment related to a topic of their choice and over a period of up to 7 days. LLMs provide structured analyses of media data and how different groups or actors respond to government actions. A use case of this tool is that some action by the government generated media activity and they want a quick and yet broad update on how people are responding in both local and global mainstream media and social media. This addresses a need that traditional media analysis, which provides insight into medium- and long-term trends, typically does not.

This tool creates a draft policy brief on a topic provided by the user by analysing academic research. The tool retrieves open-access academic articles published over a specified date range related to the user’s search query. A Large Language Model (LLM) then summarises each of these articles, extracting information that may be relevant to policymakers while removing unnecessary information such as methodologies and bibliographies. These summaries are then used to create a policy brief following a standard structure. The LLM will also make a statement regarding how relevant the retrieved research is to the search query. This provides policymakers a starting point for generating policy briefs or policies, and getting up to speed on academic research in policy-friendly language.

These two tools utilise LLM technology to summarise documents or compare them. The LLM has default instructions that help it to structure outputs and keep them relevant; however, users may also provide their own instructions. A use case for these tools is policymakers trying to identify which other policy or strategic documents align or clash with the policy they are working on. They can do this by prompting the summarisation tool to identify what other policies say about their topic, and prompting the comparison tool to identify congruencies or incongruencies between their draft policy and national strategies.

This Retrieval Augmented Generation tool contains a database of treaties between South Africa and European countries, which it uses to provide information about agreements between South Africa and foreign countries. A use case is that a public official is travelling overseas and wants to know what agreements are in place between the two nations that pertain to a certain topic. This tool allows users to intelligently search for information and informs them which agreement and which part of that agreement is relevant.