News-scraping app for media monitoring and research among AI tools showcased at GovTech event
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Tote Board assistant director of strategic planning Lau Rong Jia (left) and GovTech senior AI engineer Vincent Ng showing how the BrewBytes news-scraping app works.
ST PHOTO: LIM YAOHUI
Follow topic:
SINGAPORE – Public servants can soon search for and analyse the latest news from around the world with the help of an artificial intelligence (AI) app named BrewBytes.
Users can search by keywords on a topic – such as “elections” or “the environment” – and set filters for the type of news they want to survey, like Singapore or global sources, and the time period over which the stories were published.
Unlike googling, the AI model curates the most relevant articles from the web and summarises the gist of stories, citing the sources of the articles so that users can check the credibility, said project member Lau Rong Jia, assistant director of strategic planning at government agency Tote Board.
With the help of generative AI, the program also analyses the political, economic and social impact of the news gathered, said Mr Lau, 42, adding that the service helps media monitoring teams and researchers prepare presentations and daily updates with greater efficiency.
The Government Technology Agency (GovTech) unveiled about a dozen tech prototypes, including BrewBytes, at its Innovation Day event on Nov 15 at Jewel Changi Airport.
These projects, developed under GovTech’s Launch! innovation programme, address common pain points such as website-trawling, research and other repetitive tasks like writing reports and translation within government agencies.
According to GovTech, the programme has seen more than 600 ideas submitted by officers from 77 agencies.
Developed with GovTech, the BrewBytes program was inspired by a problem presented by the Tote Board to find a way to ease the process of gathering and analysing daily news across multiple sources.
The service simplifies the task of scanning through articles compared with typical web searches, which require users to open multiple links and browse multiple individual websites, said Mr Lau.
Articles are curated from the web based on their relevance to the user’s keywords and are organised by factors like the frequency of keywords and the number of similar headlines on the web, which indicate a topic is trending, he added.
Like most generative AI tools, the platform is prone to bringing up unrelated articles, said Mr Lau, adding that users must be discerning about what they read.
To mitigate AI’s tendency to spout false information, he said the program is designed to limit its analysis and summaries based on the specified sources and not consider information from other sources on the internet, which could affect accuracy.
Tech tools have also been developed to address other repetitive tasks.
The Singapore Customs developed a platform called JDM PriceSync to access up-to-date prices of imported vehicles for tax assessment.
The program integrates websites displaying current prices, enabling Customs officers to verify with ease the values declared by importers.
A project developed in collaboration with the Ministry of Digital Development and Information came up with a translation database containing around 500,000 terms and phrases commonly used within the Government, including policy definitions and references, to ensure consistent translations in Malay, Tamil and Chinese.
The terms include policies under the Central Provident Fund or Housing Board.
AI has been tapped to suggest related terms to help translators with their research.
Also relying on AI is a program called Matchmaker, which allows users in government agencies to describe the issues they have to resolve.
The tool then recommends the most suitable companies from the Infocomm Media Development Authority’s list of accredited vendors.
Speaking at the event, Senior Minister of State for Digital Development and Information Janil Puthucheary said the projects will go some way towards supporting the work within agencies and across Singapore.
He said: “The prototypes you see today are an illustration of how government agencies and officers have enthusiastically taken up the call to develop and apply AI skills at scale.”
