Hear Me Out
An AI assistant that helps people who've been treated unfairly find the right place to make a complaint.
The problem
People who experience racial profiling, mistreatment in healthcare or discrimination by government face confusing, inconsistent complaint systems. Many rely on catch-all bodies like the NSW Ombudsman to point them in the right direction. Others give up, and serious injustice goes unaddressed.
What we did
- Used the National Justice Project's plain-language factsheets on each complaint body as the assistant's only source of truth, so answers come from vetted content rather than the model's guesswork.
- Built a test set of about 160 realistic complaint scenarios with NJP, law firms and students, rated from simple to complex.
- Created a custom retriever that matches a person's story against roughly 900 worked examples and returns the full factsheet behind each match.
- Designed safeguards that route people in immediate danger to support services, and people in litigation to a lawyer.
- Wrote the assistant to respond in plain Australian English at a Year 7 reading level.
- Built a testing tool so NJP's experts could review every run before launch.
- [What you personally led or decided]
Key insight
Some errors are immune to good data. The model kept sending police complaints to the Ombudsman until we told it directly. Test against real stories, not just accuracy scores.
Outcome
- LIVE IN NSWFunded by a NSW Attorney-General innovation grant
- GOOD DESIGNAward winner 2025, Concept Design
- NEXT: VICExpanding to Victorian complaint bodies
- ON AIRFeatured on 2SER radio, 2026
