The recommended bills feature complements our other AI Assist features: AI summaries on bill pages and in bill sheets and our similar bills feature which generates a list of similar bills for any bill you're looking at. Recommended bills does much the same thing, but instead of a single bill, it shows you bills that are similar to all the bills in your bill sheet.
To use the feature, simply open any of your bill sheets and look for the magic wand Similar button at the bottom:
Click the button, and after a few seconds as the AI works its magic you will see a new tab on your bill sheet called Similar. This tab will contain a new grid with 100 new bills that the AI has deemed similar to the bills that are in your bill sheet.
Just like similar bills on bill pages, the list is sorted by relevance, with the bills that the AI thinks are most relevant to you at the top. The final Score column shows you how confident the AI is that the bills are relevant, with a score above about 75 being a reasonable match. You can now click the + symbol to the left of any bill to add it to the bill sheet (or in fact any other bill sheet you have created).
How Does It Work?
The AI is reading and analysing all the bill text, summaries and so on from the bills in your bill sheet (but not the bills you have hidden) and making a judgement about what bills you are interested in. If the recommended bills list is not what you're looking for then there are two main reasons for this - either your main bill sheet has already found all the relevant bills and the AI simply can't find any more good ones (hurrah!), or there are too many bills in the bill sheet that aren't actually relevant to your topic which are confusing the AI (boo!).
The recommended bills feature works best with a well curated bill sheet!
A few things to note:
- The Similar tab will not contain any bills that are either in your main bill sheet list or the hidden tab - they will all be new bills.
- You will only see bills from states that are in your main query - if you have a single state search the AI will only give you bills from that state.
- You will only see bills, the AI will not recommend resolutions or memorials or any other bill type.
- You will see bills that match the time period you have chosen on the query tab. If you have left it as current session then you will only see bills from current sessions. If you have chosen to look back to previous years, then the AI will show you bills from those years.
- The AI does not use your query terms to generate the list, or any of the other filters you may have used such as committee category. The whole point is to help you find bills that your main query may have missed.
- When you click a different tab in your bill sheet the Similar tab will disappear. You can regenerate it by clicking the Similar button again. So the list will always reflect the current state of your bill sheet if you make changes to your query or hide or unhide bills.
- If your bill sheet has more than 100 bills on it, the AI will randomly select 100 to analyze. That means that for larger bill sheets, you may get slightly different results each time you click the button as the results will be based on a different set of 100 bills.
- You can filter your main bill sheet down to a subset of bills, such as just the bills that have passed, or just bills from certain states. When you click the Similar button, the AI will just analyze the subset of bills from your filter. Read more about filtering a bill sheet.
How Should I Use the Feature?
Primarily, the recommended bills feature can be used to check that you have all the best bills on your bill sheet. If you spot any that are missing, then you can add them with the +. You can also have a look at the bills and see why they didn't match your query: do they not contain one of your search terms? Were they eliminated by a 'contains none of' search term? You can then decided whether you need to change your query, and then run the recommended bills search again to check for any more.
It is also very useful for spotting model bills - bills that are almost identical introduced in different states. They will tend to score very highly in the recommended list.
You can also use this feature to spot trends over time, by identifying similar bills from past sessions and looking at how the language used in the bills has changed over the years.