The i.AI unit in the Cabinet Office has begun to test its consultation analyser with central government departments.
It is one of the first projects to be run by the Incubator for AI, which has been set up to lead the option of the technology in public services.
i.AI said that it has already run a pilot of the tool with the Department of Health and Social Care and plans to make the code open source and available on GitHub.
It has been developed to make the analysis of public responses to government consultations faster and fairer. It uses the topic modelling technique in natural language processing to automatically extract patterns and themes from the responses and turns them into dashboards for policy makers.
This is projected save tens of millions of pounds in managing the 700-800 consultations run each year by central government bodies.
Security factor
The team said the language model in the system is run on its own computers, not those of OpenAI used in ChatGPT, which enables it to keep confidential data secure.
The unit is also working on a Redbox Copilot project to interrogate and summarise thousands of documents that go into ministerial redboxes. It has now run trials of a prototype with three private offices within the Cabinet Office and is looking to extend them across the Civil Service.
Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden recently referred to the projects as the early initiatives from i.AI, adding that funding for any government AI project will now be tied to departments collaborating with the unit.
