TORONTO — Federal government departments are testing an artificial intelligence tool that promises to more efficiently track what happens at Parliamentary committees, as Ottawa looks for ways to use the technology to boost public-service productivity.

 

The IT unit at Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) developed the application, called ParlBrief. It uses AI models to transcribe recordings of committee meetings, summarize the discussion and run sentiment analysis to assess its tone. Human officials use those documents to produce a final report, which is reviewed by a manager.

Departmental staff must send summaries of committee meetings to senior officials within three hours of their end. ParlBrief cuts the time to produce the reports by one hour, according to an internal ISED memo from February. “The AI summaries will reduce time-consuming transcribing and note-taking, and therefore will improve the efficiency of officers who monitor committees,” states the memo, which estimates the tool will save staff 520 hours a year. The Logic obtained the file via an access to information request.

Four federal departments began testing ParlBrief in May, and the pilot period is set to end next month. Staff haven’t yet tried the tool in live conditions; instead, they’re testing it on old committee meetings. Testers are “comparing AI-generated summaries to human-drafted summaries” to “ensure accuracy and relevance,” said ISED spokesperson Justin Simard. Staff are also identifying whether the tool needs any additional features. 

ParlBrief is powered by models from several AI labs. The summarization part of the tool employs Command R+, a product of Toronto-based Cohere—a firm federal policymakers have touted as a Canadian AI champion. ISED isn’t yet paying for the model because its testing requirements are within the free trial limit of usage, said Simard.

To transcribe the audio from committee meetings, ParlBrief uses Whisper, an open-source speech recognition model developed by OpenAI. The sentiment analysis is performed by French lab Mistral’s Large model, which is also open-source. ParlBrief is built in such a way that the models can be easily swapped out if better ones become available “as this technology continues to evolve rapidly,” Simard said. 

When Parliament is in full swing, generating summaries of hearings takes up a lot of public servants’ time, according to the ISED memo. The 46 standing committees across the Senate and House of Commons typically meet twice weekly, meaning departments must produce more than 90 reports. 

“Meeting the three-hour deadline can be challenging,” the memo states. The process “regularly requires work outside of standard hours, incurring salary overtime costs, negatively affecting employee well-being as well as staff recruitment and retention.” The AI tool is designed to help reduce those expenses. 

The Liberal government has touted the technology as a way to improve the productivity and efficiency of the public service. Ottawa’s internal strategy, published in March, calls for officials to consider using AI when developing new programs and policies.

Lots of public servants are already using ChatGPT and other commercial AI products for the “more onerous” tasks in their workdays, federal chief data officer Stephen Burt said in a recent interview. Ottawa wants to build more AI tools in-house to replace those unauthorized applications, and to share technology across departments to reduce duplication.

Meanwhile, Cohere is making a major push into the public sector. Last month, the firm announced it was working with the federal government to deploy AI in its operations. Cohere declined to provide more details, but at a recent event for public servants, co-founder Ivan Zhang said the company is “engaged with [the government] across a few departments.”

ISED isn’t currently using Cohere’s technology for anything other than ParlBrief, Simard said. The other departments testing the summarization tool include the Privy Council Office, the public-service counterpart to the Prime Minister’s Office; Global Affairs Canada; and Employment and Social Development Canada.